Analysis of Unanswered Prayers
Ella Wheeler Wilcox 1855 (Janesville) – 1919
Like some school master, kind in being stern,
Who hears the children crying o’er their slates
And calling, “Help me master! ” yet helps not,
Since in his silence and refusal lies
Their self-development, so God abides
Unheeding many prayers. He is not deaf
To any cry sent up from earnest hearts,
He hears and strengthens when He must deny.
He sees us weeping over life’s hard sums
But should He give us the key and dry our tears
What would it profit us when school were done
And not one lesson mastered?
What a world
Where this if all our prayers were answered. Not
In famed Pandora’s box were such vast ills
As lie in human hearts. Should our desires
Voiced one by one in prayer ascend to God
And come back as events shaped to our wish
What chaos would result!
In my fierce youth
I sighed out a breath enough to move a fleet
Voicing wild prayers to heaven for fancied boons
Which were denied; and that denial bends
My knee to prayers of gratitude each day
Of my maturer years. Yet from those prayers
I rose always regirded for the strife
And conscious of new strength. Pray on, sad heart,
That which thou pleadest for may not be given
But in the lofty altitude where souls
Who supplicate God’s grace are lifted there
Thou shalt find help to bear thy daily lot
Which is not elsewhere found.
Scheme | ABCDEFGHIJKLMCNOPQRSTUVWJXYKZ1 C2 |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 1111010101 1101010111 0101110111 1011000101 1101001101 11011111 1101111101 1101011101 1111010111 111110101101 1111011101 0111010 101 11111010101 01110111 110101110010 1111010111 01110111101 110101 0111 11101011101 10111101101 1001010101 111111011 11111111 1111101 0101111111 1111111110 100101011 11111101 1111111101 11111 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,296 |
Words | 243 |
Sentences | 11 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 32 |
Lines Amount | 32 |
Letters per line (avg) | 32 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 1,024 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 246 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on April 04, 2023
- 1:12 min read
- 157 Views
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"Unanswered Prayers" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 29 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/10968/unanswered-prayers>.
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