Analysis of The Cool Web
Robert Graves 1895 (Wimbledon) – 1985 (Deià)
Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by.
But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the rose's cruel scent.
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.
There's a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.
But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children's day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.
Scheme | XXAA BXCC XXAB XXDBDB |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 10111111011 1101110101 1100111101 1100110101 1111110101 0111010101 110101001 1101010001 1011110110 0111111111 1111110101 0101 111110111010 10110011001 01101011111 1001110101 1001011001 1111110111 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 764 |
Words | 147 |
Sentences | 6 |
Stanzas | 4 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 6 |
Lines Amount | 18 |
Letters per line (avg) | 34 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 151 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 36 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 45 sec read
- 136 Views
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"The Cool Web" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 27 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/31179/the-cool-web>.
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