Analysis of Chenille
James Dickey 1923 (Atlanta) – 1997 (Columbia)
by James Dickey
There are two facing peacocks
Or a ship flapping
On its own white tufted sail
At roadside, near a mill;
Flamingoes also are hanging
By their bills on bedspreads
And an occasional mallard.
These you can buy anywhere.
They are made by machine
From a sanctioned, unholy pattern
rigid with industry.
They hoard the smell of oil
And hum like looms all night
Into your pores, reweaving
Your body from bobbins.
There is only one quiet
Place—in a scuppernong arbor—
Where animals as they
Would be, are born into sleep-cloth:
A middle-aged man’s grandmother
Sits in the summer green light
Of leaves, gone toothless
For eating grapes better,
And pulls the animals through
With a darning needle:
Deer, rabbits and birds,
Red whales and unicorns,
Winged elephants, crowned ants:
Beasts that cannot be thought of
By the wholly sane
Rise up in the rough, blurred
Flowers of the fuzzy cloth
In only their timeless outlines
Like the beasts of Heaven:
Those sketched out badly, divinely
By stars not wholly sane.
Love, I have slept in that house.
There it was winter
The tattered moonfields crept
through the trellis, and fell
In vine-tangled shade on my face
Like thrown-away knitting
Before cloud came and dimmed
Those scars from off me.
My fingernails chilled
To the bone. I called
For another body to be
With me, and warm us both.
A unicorn neighed; I folded
His neck in my arms
And was safe, as he lay down.
All night from thickening Heaven,
Someone up there kept throwing
Bedspreads upon me.
Softly I called, and they came:
The ox and the basilisk,
The griffin, the phoenix, the lion—
Light-bodied, only the essence,
The tufted, creative starfields
Behind the assembling clouds—
The snake from the apple tree came
To save me from freezing,
And at last the lung-winged ship
On its own sail scented with potash
Fell sighing upon us all.
The last two nails
Of cold died out in my nostrils
Under the dance-weight of beasts.
I lay, breathing like thread,
An inspired outline of myself,
As rain began greatly to fall, And closed the door of the Ark.
Scheme | A BCXX CBDXXXAX EABX FXGFEXFX XXBX XHDGX IAH XFXX XCXAXXAX XXXI CAJA IXBX JCXX XXXXXXX |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 1110 111101 10110 1111101 11101 110110 11111 01010010 111110 111101 101001010 101100 110111 011111 01111 11011 1110110 1001010 110011 11110111 0101110 1001011 11110 110110 0101001 10110 11001 1101 110011 1110111 10101 110011 1010101 0101101 101110 11110010 111101 1111011 11110 01011 101001 01101111 110110 011101 11111 1101 10111 10101011 110111 0101110 11011 0111111 11110010 111110 1011 1011011 01001 010010010 11010010 0100101 01001001 01101011 111110 0110111 11111011 1100111 0111 11110110 1001111 111011 1010111 110110110101101 |
Closest metre | Iambic trimeter |
Characters | 2,079 |
Words | 360 |
Sentences | 14 |
Stanzas | 15 |
Stanza Lengths | 1, 4, 8, 4, 8, 4, 5, 3, 4, 8, 4, 4, 4, 4, 7 |
Lines Amount | 72 |
Letters per line (avg) | 23 |
Words per line (avg) | 5 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 109 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 24 |
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Submitted on April 29, 2020
Modified on April 26, 2023
- 1:48 min read
- 55 Views
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"Chenille" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 25 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/53305/chenille>.
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