Analysis of The Singing-Woman From The Wood's Edge
What should I be but a prophet and a liar,
Whose mother was a leprechaun, whose father was a friar?
Teethed on a crucifix and cradled under water,
What should I be but the fiend's god-daughter?
And who should be my playmates but the adder and the frog,
That was got beneath a furze-bush and born in a bog?
And what should be my singing, that was christened at an altar,
But Aves and Credos and Psalms out of the Psalter?
You will see such webs on the wet grass, maybe,
As a pixie-mother weaves for her baby,
You will find such flame at the wave's weedy ebb
As flashes in the meshes of a mer-mother's web,
But there comes to birth no common spawn
From the love a a priest for a leprechaun,
And you never have seen and you never will see
Such things as the things that swaddled me!
After all's said and after all's done,
What should I be but a harlot and a nun?
In through the bushes, on any foggy day,
My Da would come a-swishing of the drops away,
With a prayer for my death and a groan for my birth,
A-mumbling of his beads for all that he was worth.
And there'd sit my Ma, with her knees beneath her chin,
A-looking in his face and a-drinking of it in,
And a-marking in the moss some funny little saying
That would mean just the opposite of all that he was praying!
He taught me the holy-talk of Vesper and of Matin,
He heard me my Greek and he heard me my Latin,
He blessed me and crossed me to keep my soul from evil,
And we watched him out of sight, and we conjured up the devil!
Oh, the things I haven't seen and the things I haven't known,
What with hedges and ditches till after I was grown,
And yanked both way by my mother and my father,
With a "Which would you better?" and a " Which would you
rather?"
With him for a sire and her for a dam,
What should I be but just what I am?
Scheme | AAAA BBAA CCDD EECC FF GGHH IIJJ EFKK LLAXA MM |
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Poetic Form | |
Metre | 111110100010 1101011101010 11010011010 1111101110 0111111010001 1110101101001 011111011101110 11010111010 11111101110 10101011010 11111101101 1100010101101 111111101 101001101 011011011011 11101111 101101011 11111010001 01010110101 11110110101 101111001111 0100111111111 011111010101 0100110010110 00100011101010 111101001111110 1110101110011 111110111110 1110111111110 011111101101010 10111010011101 1110010110111 011111100110 101111000111 10 11101000101 111111111 |
Closest metre | Iambic hexameter |
Characters | 1,761 |
Words | 363 |
Sentences | 13 |
Stanzas | 10 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4, 2, 4, 4, 4, 5, 2 |
Lines Amount | 37 |
Letters per line (avg) | 37 |
Words per line (avg) | 10 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 137 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 36 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on April 03, 2023
- 1:50 min read
- 100 Views
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"The Singing-Woman From The Wood's Edge" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 29 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/9477/the-singing-woman-from-the-wood%27s-edge>.
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