Analysis of Ultima Thule: Night

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1807 (Portland) – 1882 (Cambridge)



Into the darkness and the hush of night
Slowly the landscape sinks, and fades away,
And with it fade the phantoms of the day,
The ghosts of men and things, that haunt the light,
The crowd, the clamor, the pursuit, the flight,
The unprofitable splendor and display,
The agitations, and the cares that prey
Upon our hearts, all vanish out of sight.
The better life begins; the world no more
Molests us; all its records we erase
From the dull commonplace book of our lives,
That like a palimpsest is written o'er
With trivial incidents of time and place,
And lo! the ideal, hidden beneath, revives.


Scheme ABBAABBACDEFDG
Poetic Form
Metre 0101000111 100110101 0111010101 0111011101 0101000101 00100010001 0100111 01101110111 0101010111 0111101101 1011011101 110111010 11001001101 01001100101
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 590
Words 108
Sentences 4
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 14
Lines Amount 14
Letters per line (avg) 33
Words per line (avg) 8
Letters per stanza (avg) 468
Words per stanza (avg) 106
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

32 sec read
141

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American poet and educator whose works include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline. more…

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