Analysis of Butterflies

Siegfried Sassoon 1886 (Matfield) – 1967 (Heytesbury)



Frail Travellers, deftly flickering over the flowers;
O living flowers against the heedless blue
Of summer days, what sends them dancing through
This fiery-blossom’d revel of the hours?

Theirs are the musing silences between
The enraptured crying of shrill birds that make
Heaven in the wood while summer dawns awake;
And theirs the faintest winds that hush the green.

And they are as my soul that wings its way
Out of the starlit dimness into morn:
And they are as my tremulous being—born
To know but this, the phantom glare of day.


Scheme ABBA CDDC EFFE
Poetic Form Quatrain 
Metre 11001010010010 1101001011 1101111101 11001101010 1101010001 00101011111 10001110101 0101011101 0111111111 110101011 01111100101 1111010111
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 543
Words 94
Sentences 4
Stanzas 3
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4
Lines Amount 12
Letters per line (avg) 36
Words per line (avg) 8
Letters per stanza (avg) 143
Words per stanza (avg) 31
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

28 sec read
91

Siegfried Sassoon

Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, CBE, MC was an eminent English poet, writer, and soldier. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the leading poets of the First World War. His poetry both described the horrors of the trenches, and satirised the patriotic pretensions of those who, in Sassoon's view, were responsible for a jingoism-fuelled war. He later won acclaim for his prose work, notably his three-volume fictionalised autobiography, collectively known as the "Sherston trilogy". more…

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