Analysis of The Wait

Rainer Maria Rilke 1875 (Prague) – 1926 (Montreux)



It is life in slow motion,
it's the heart in reverse,
it's a hope-and-a-half:
too much and too little at once.

It's a train that suddenly
stops with no station around,
and we can hear the cricket,
and, leaning out the carriage

door, we vainly contemplate
a wind we feel that stirs
the blooming meadows, the meadows
made imaginary by this stop.

Translated by A. Poulin


Scheme XXXX XXXX XXXX X
Poetic Form
Metre 1110110 101001 101001 11011011 1011100 1111001 0111010 0101010 111010 011111 010101 10100111 0101001
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 363
Words 68
Sentences 4
Stanzas 4
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4, 1
Lines Amount 13
Letters per line (avg) 22
Words per line (avg) 5
Letters per stanza (avg) 71
Words per stanza (avg) 17
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 27, 2023

21 sec read
684

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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