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Sweat
In the day our spent heat
Might stick to me
And exhaust us like infantry
Of high summits
And of valley air despaired
Then the fire where repair
The hilt and helm
Where drudgery to parody foretells
Mad Charles’s buggy retinue
About the rim of raillery
I come in Day-done vanity
To the tip
And look with sole proprietorship
Down the dark-dumb climb
Behind the men encamped
Where grass-lover’s like to tramp
I hear (or so I’m told)
Their bellows low
The porcupines, like frigate group
The tenters menace with their ancient rub
No spear nor club
Do check their wend
Cloaked as caps of highwaymen
That with their move take grin and graft
As payment for the noon re-draft.
Might stick to me
And exhaust us like infantry
Of high summits
And of valley air despaired
Then the fire where repair
The hilt and helm
Where drudgery to parody foretells
Mad Charles’s buggy retinue
About the rim of raillery
I come in Day-done vanity
To the tip
And look with sole proprietorship
Down the dark-dumb climb
Behind the men encamped
Where grass-lover’s like to tramp
I hear (or so I’m told)
Their bellows low
The porcupines, like frigate group
The tenters menace with their ancient rub
No spear nor club
Do check their wend
Cloaked as caps of highwaymen
That with their move take grin and graft
As payment for the noon re-draft.
I feel like I'm missing some historical context to understand this. The reference to Mad Charles makes me think it's narrated by a soldier in a long-ago English war.
There's a lot of creative language use (porcupines evokes a group of spear-wielding soldiers to me), and I'm afraid some of it is too clever and just rolls off me (I don't know what the bit about drudgery versus parody means, and I don't get the use of "rub"). It's also one where the rhyme scheme seems fluid. The majority of the stanzas seem to be ABBCD, where each stanza's D becomes the next stanza's A, except the last one just does ABBCC. But there are breaks from that (the 4th stanza's told/low doesn't even come close to rhyming) and some are pretty big stretches (helm/foretells, wend/highwaymen) so that I can't tell if a rhyme scheme was even intended. It almost feels like slam poetry to me, where rhymes just go in irregularly, wherever the poet is inspired to put them.
There's a lot of creative language use (porcupines evokes a group of spear-wielding soldiers to me), and I'm afraid some of it is too clever and just rolls off me (I don't know what the bit about drudgery versus parody means, and I don't get the use of "rub"). It's also one where the rhyme scheme seems fluid. The majority of the stanzas seem to be ABBCD, where each stanza's D becomes the next stanza's A, except the last one just does ABBCC. But there are breaks from that (the 4th stanza's told/low doesn't even come close to rhyming) and some are pretty big stretches (helm/foretells, wend/highwaymen) so that I can't tell if a rhyme scheme was even intended. It almost feels like slam poetry to me, where rhymes just go in irregularly, wherever the poet is inspired to put them.
I agree that this seems to be painting an historical image but without furnishing much to help the reader. Sometimes this can be a very effective technique, if there is the right material for reference, or at least some footnotes; but to try and "reflect" on behalf of the reader is probably a mistake.