Analysis of The Crowd At The Ball Game
William Carlos Williams 1883 (Rutherford) – 1963 (Rutherford)
The crowd at the ball game
is moved uniformly
by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them—
all the exciting detail
of the chase
and the escape, the error
the flash of genius—
all to no end save beauty
the eternal—
So in detail they, the crowd,
are beautiful
for this
to be warned against
saluted and defied—
It is alive, venomous
it smiles grimly
its words cut—
The flashy female with her
mother, gets it—
The Jew gets it straight— it
is deadly, terrifying—
It is the Inquisition, the
Revolution
It is beauty itself
that lives
day by day in them
idly—
This is
the power of their faces
It is summer, it is the solstice
the crowd is
cheering, the crowd is laughing
in detail
permanently, seriously
without thought
Scheme | XA BC DB EB AF XF BX XB AX EG GH XX XB CA BB BB HD AX |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 011011 11100 101011 1011 1001001 101 0001010 01110 1111110 0010 1001101 1100 11 11101 010001 1101100 1110 111 010110 1011 011111 110100 1100100 010 111001 11 11101 10 11 0101110 111011010 011 1001110 001 10001000 011 |
Closest metre | Iambic trimeter |
Characters | 740 |
Words | 133 |
Sentences | 1 |
Stanzas | 18 |
Stanza Lengths | 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2 |
Lines Amount | 36 |
Letters per line (avg) | 16 |
Words per line (avg) | 4 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 31 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 7 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on April 21, 2023
- 39 sec read
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