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

Rainer Maria Rilke

René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke — better known as Rainer Maria Rilke — was a Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, "widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets", writing in both verse and highly lyrical prose. more…

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    Do not go gentle into that good _______. Rage, rage against the dying of the light
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