Analysis of The Phantom Ball
Ella Wheeler Wilcox 1855 (Janesville) – 1919
You remember the hall on the corner?
To-night as I walked down street
I heard the sound of music,
And the rhythmic beat and beat,
In time to the pulsing measure
Of lightly tripping feet.
And I turned and entered the doorway-
It was years since I had been there-
Years, and life seemed altered:
Pleasure had changed to care.
But again I was hearing the music
And watching the dancers fair.
And then, as I stood and listened,
The music lost its glee;
And instead of the merry waltzers
There were ghosts of the Used-to-be-
Ghosts of the pleasure-seekers
Who once had danced with me.
Oh, 'twas a ghastly picture!
Oh, 'twas a gruesome crowd!
Each bearing a skull on his shoulder,
Each trailing a long white shroud,
As they whirled in the dance together,
And the music shrieked aloud.
As they danced, their dry bones rattled
Like shutters in a blast;
And they stared from eyeless sockets
On me as they circled past;
And the music that kept them whirling
Was a funeral dirge played fast.
Some of them wore their face-cloths,
Others were rotted away.
Some had mould on their garments,
And some seemed dead but a day.
Corpses all, but I knew them
As friends, once blithe and gay.
Beauty and strength and manhood-
And this was the end of it all:
Nothing but phantoms whirling
In a ghastly skeleton ball.
But the music ceased-and they vanished,
And I came away from the hall.
Scheme | ABCBAB DEXECE XFGFGF AHAHAH XIGIJI GDGDXD XKJKXK |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 1010011010 1111111 1101110 0010101 01101010 110101 01101001 11111111 101110 101111 1011110010 0100101 01111010 010111 00110101 10110111 1101010 111111 1101010 110101 110011110 1100111 111001010 0010101 11111110 110001 01111010 1111101 001011110 10100111 1111111 1001001 1111110 0111101 1011111 111101 100101 01101111 1011010 00101001 101010110 01101101 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,331 |
Words | 250 |
Sentences | 15 |
Stanzas | 7 |
Stanza Lengths | 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6 |
Lines Amount | 42 |
Letters per line (avg) | 25 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 153 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 35 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:15 min read
- 38 Views
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"The Phantom Ball" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 28 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/10885/the-phantom-ball>.
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