Analysis of The Tomb At Akr Çaar

Ezra Pound 1885 (Hailey) – 1972 (Venice)



‘I am thy soul, Nikoptis. I have watched
These five millennia, and thy dead eyes
Moved not, nor ever answer my desire,
And thy light limbs, wherethrough I leapt aflame,
Burn not with me nor any saffron thing.

See, the light grass sprang up to pillow thee,
And kissed thee with a myriad grassy tongues;
But not thou me.
I have read out the gold upon the wall,
And wearied out my thought upon the signs.
And there is no new thing in all this place.

I have been kind. See, I have left the jars sealed,
Lest thou shouldst wake and whimper for thy wine.
And all thy robes I have kept smooth on thee.

O thou unmindful ! How should I forget!
-Even the river many days ago,
The river? thou wast over young.
And three souls came upon Thee-
And I came.
And I flowed in upon thee, beat them off;
1 have been intimate with thee, known thy ways.
Have I not touched thy palms and finger-tips,
Flowed in, and through thee and about thy heels?
How 'came I in'? Was I not thee and Thee?

And no sun comes to rest me in this place,
And I am torn against the jagged dark,
And no light beats upon me, and you say
No word, day after day.

Oh! I could get me out, despite the marks
And all their crafty work upon the door,
Out through the glass-green fields. . . .

Yet it is quiet here:
I do not go.’


Scheme XXXAX BXBXXC XXB XDXBAXXXXB CXEE XXX XD
Poetic Form
Metre 11111111 1101000111 11110101010 011111101 1111110101 1011111101 01110100101 1111 1111010101 0101110101 0111110111 11111111011 1111010111 0111111111 11111101 1001010101 01011101 0111011 011 0110011111 1110011111 1111110101 1001100111 1110111101 0111111011 011101011 0111011011 111101 1111110101 0111010101 110111 111101 1111
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 1,256
Words 255
Sentences 25
Stanzas 7
Stanza Lengths 5, 6, 3, 10, 4, 3, 2
Lines Amount 33
Letters per line (avg) 29
Words per line (avg) 8
Letters per stanza (avg) 138
Words per stanza (avg) 37
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 30, 2023

1:16 min read
174

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic of the early modernist movement. more…

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