Analysis of Homage to Hieronymus Bosch
Thomas MacGreevy 1893 (Tarbert, County Kerry) – 1967
A woman with no face walked into the light;
A boy, in a brown-tree norfolk suit,
Holding on
Without hands
To her seeming skirt.
She stopped,
And he stopped,
And I, in terror, stopped, staring.
Then I saw a group of shadowy figures behind her.
It was a wild wet morning
But the little world was spinning on.
Liplessly, somehow, she addressed it:
The book must be opened
And the park too.
I might have tittered
But my teeth chattered
And I saw that the words, as they fell,
Lay, wriggling, on the ground.
There was a stir of wet wind
And the shadowy figures began to stir
When one I had thought dead
Filmed slowly out of his great effigy on a tomb near by
And they all shuddered
He bent as if to speak to the woman
But the nursery governor flew up out of the well of Saint Patrick,
Confiscated by his mistress,
And, his head bent,
Staring out over his spectacles,
And scratching the gravel furiously, Hissed -
The words went pingg! like bullets,
Upwards, past his spectacles
Say nothing, I say, say nothing, say nothing!
And he who had seemed to be coming to life
Gasped,
Began hysterically, to laugh and cry,
And, with a gesture of impotent and half-petulant despair,
Filmed back into his effigy again.
High above the Bank of Ireland
Unearthly music sounded,
Passing westwards.
Then, from the drains,
Small sewage rats slid out.
They numbered hundreds of hundreds, tens, thousands.
Each bowed obsequiously to the shadowy figures
Then turned and joined in a stomach dance with his brothers and sisters.
Being a multitude, they danced irregularly.
There was rat laughter, Deeper here and there,
And occasionally she-rats grew hysterical.
The shadowy figures looked on, agonized.
The woman with no face gave a cry and collapsed.
The rats danced on her
And on the wriggling words
Smirking.
The nursery governor flew back into the well
With the little figure without hands in the brown-tree clothes.
Scheme | AXBXX CCD E DB XFX AAGX XEXHXXXX XIXXIDXXHJX FXK XXXLLXJXXXEKDGX |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 01011110101 010011101 101 011 10101 11 011 01010110 11101110010010 1101110 101011101 111011 011110 0011 1111 1111 011101111 11101 1101111 00100100111 111111 110111110010111 01110 1111111010 101001001111011110 1001110 0111 101101100 01001010001 0111110 1011100 11011110110 01111111011 1 011001101 0101011000110001 1101110001 101011100 0101010 1010 1101 110111 11010110110 1111010010 1101001011110010 100101101000 1111010101 0010001110100 0100101110 010111101001 01110 01011 10 0100100110101 10101001100111 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,863 |
Words | 335 |
Sentences | 20 |
Stanzas | 10 |
Stanza Lengths | 5, 3, 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 11, 3, 15 |
Lines Amount | 55 |
Letters per line (avg) | 27 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 150 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 33 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 07, 2023
- 1:40 min read
- 42 Views
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"Homage to Hieronymus Bosch" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 17 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/36805/homage-to-hieronymus-bosch>.
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