Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal
Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal - meaning Summary
Simple Canal-side Commemoration
The speaker asks to be remembered not with a grand tomb but by a simple seat beside canal water in midsummer. He links quiet, green waterways and ordinary sights—a swan, bridges, a barge—to a lived, poetic sense of place. The canal becomes both refuge and source of mythic resonance, where silence, everyday movement, and subtle light are preferred over heroic memorials as fitting commemoration.
Read Complete AnalysesO commemorate me where there is water, Canal water preferably, so stilly Greeny at the heart of summer. Brother Commemorate me thus beautifully. Where by a lock Niagariously roars The falls for those who sit in the tremendous silence Of mid-July. No one will speak in prose Who finds his way to these Parnassian islands. A swan goes by head low with many apologies, Fantastic light looks through the eyes of bridges And look! a barge comes bringing from Athy And other far-flung towns mythologies. O commemorate me with no hero-courageous Tomb - just a canal-bank seat for the passer-by.
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