Dirge to a Dead Owl
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
1872 to 1942
Track 1
Reconstruct the poem by dragging each line into its correct position. Your goal is to reassemble the original poem as accurately as possible. As you move the lines, you'll see whether your arrangement is correct, helping you explore the poem's flow and meaning. You can also print out the jumbled poem to cut up and reassemble in the classroom. Either way, take your time, enjoy the process, and discover how the poet's words come together to create something truly beautiful.
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From some sequestered, hidden, noontide haunt.
Where doubtless you'd been napping.
You for the sweepstakes woodcock.
None of the guns shall guess that I mistook
Over your warm, uncaring, earthly habit,
A swift, deceptive presence in the cover,
Roused by the beaters' distant sticks a-tapping.
To the dim nether world of endless twilight,
Over the pinions that no more may sweep
The empty dark, those shores forlorn, abhorrent,)
Your little ghost, I like to think, has sped
By Styx's gloomy torrent!
Bird of Minerva, tawny-eyed moon-lover.
You loathed that sunrise bore, the dull but good cock),
You faced the sunshine mid the fir-trees gaunt,
Lies where a few pale, floating plumes still fly light;
Vaguely irresolute, soft-breasted, brown.
(Fit paradise for one who loved full well
Upon the unsophisticated rabbit;
Now all that's mortal of you, limp and dead.
Silent, mysterious, on wings of down,
Meanwhile with hasty hands the mould I'll heap
Lost to the daylight (which you couldn't brook,
To sail for ever o'er the asphodel.