Analysis of Lament
Rainer Maria Rilke 1875 (Prague) – 1926 (Montreux)
Everything is far
and long gone by.
I think that the star
glittering above me
has been dead for a million years.
I think there were tears
in the car I heard pass
and something terrible was said.
A clock has stopped striking in the house
across the road...
When did it start?...
I would like to step out of my heart
an go walking beneath the enormous sky.
I would like to pray.
And surely of all the stars that perished
long ago,
one still exists.
I think that I know
which one it is--
which one, at the end of its beam in the sky,
stands like a white city...
Scheme | ABACDEFGHIJJBKLMNMOBC |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 1011 0111 11101 100011 11110101 11101 001111 01010011 011110001 0101 1111 111111111 11100100101 11111 0101101110 101 1101 11111 1111 11101111001 110110 |
Closest metre | Iambic trimeter |
Characters | 546 |
Words | 114 |
Sentences | 10 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 21 |
Lines Amount | 21 |
Letters per line (avg) | 20 |
Words per line (avg) | 5 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 426 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 112 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on April 30, 2023
- 34 sec read
- 466 Views
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"Lament" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 29 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/29686/lament>.
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