Analysis of Hillcrest
Edwin Arlington Robinson 1869 – 1935
(To Mrs. Edward MacDowell)
No sound of any storm that shakes
Old island walls with older seas
Comes here where now September makes
An island in a sea of trees.
Between the sunlight and the shade
A man may learn till he forgets
The roaring of a world remade,
And all his ruins and regrets;
And if he still remembers here
Poor fights he may have won or lost,—
If he be ridden with the fear
Of what some other fight may cost,—
If, eager to confuse too soon,
What he has known with what may be,
He reads a planet out of tune
For cause of his jarred harmony,—
If here he venture to unroll
His index of adagios,
And he be given to console
Humanity with what he knows,—
He may by contemplation learn
A little more than what he knew,
And even see great oaks return
To acorns out of which they grew.
He may, if he but listen well,
Through twilight and the silence here,
Be told what there are none may tell
To vanity’s impatient ear;
And he may never dare again
Say what awaits him, or be sure
What sunlit labyrinth of pain
He may not enter and endure.
Who knows to-day from yesterday
May learn to count no thing too strange:
Love builds of what Time takes away,
Till Death itself is less than Change.
Who sees enough in his duress
May go as far as dreams have gone;
Who sees a little may do less
Than many who are blind have done;
Who sees unchastened here the soul
Triumphant has no other sight
Than has a child who sees the whole
World radiant with his own delight.
Far journeys and hard wandering
Await him in whose crude surmise
Peace, like a mask, hides everything
That is and has been from his eyes;
And all his wisdom is unfound,
Or like a web that error weaves
On airy looms that have a sound
No louder now than falling leaves.
Scheme | A BCBC DEDE FXXX GHGH ABIX JKJK LFLF XMXM NONO PXPX IQIQ RSRS DTXT |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 11010010 11110111 11011101 11110101 11000111 0101001 01111101 01010101 01110001 01110101 11111111 11110101 11110111 11010111 11111111 11010111 11111100 1111011 11011 01110110 01001111 1110101 01011111 01011101 11011111 11111101 1100101 11111111 110101 01110101 11011111 111011 11110001 1111110 11111111 11111101 11011111 11010110 11111111 11010111 11011111 111101 01011101 11011101 110011101 11001100 01101101 1101110 11011111 0111011 11011101 11011101 11011101 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,734 |
Words | 342 |
Sentences | 8 |
Stanzas | 14 |
Stanza Lengths | 1, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4 |
Lines Amount | 53 |
Letters per line (avg) | 26 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 97 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 24 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 23, 2023
- 1:42 min read
- 176 Views
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"Hillcrest" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 19 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/9979/hillcrest>.
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