Analysis of Monarch



These lift me through the airy height
(These wings acquired through a night),
Into a foreign world above
Of light and warmth and truth and love.

What seems a dream are days gone by
When I knew nothing of the sky—
Just toil on an earthly bed
And thoughts of milkweed in my head.

But then I there within a husk
That dangled from an aspen tusk
Began to form a different bent
That I knew not was heaven meant.

And now I'm lifted through this air,
And though attaining beauty fair,
The only thing that moves me now
Is that I share this flight somehow.


Scheme AABB CCDD EEFF GGHH
Poetic Form Quatrain 
Metre 11110101 11010101 01010101 11010101 11011111 11110101 1111101 0111011 11110101 11011101 011101001 11111101 01110111 01010101 01011111 1111111
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 553
Words 116
Sentences 4
Stanzas 4
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4, 4
Lines Amount 16
Letters per line (avg) 27
Words per line (avg) 7
Letters per stanza (avg) 108
Words per stanza (avg) 27

About this poem

It was sometime in spring of 2008 when I was asleep one afternoon and, in my dream, in both rhyme and meter, these words appeared there: "But then I there within a husk / That dangled from an aspen tusk". I woke up, I wrote the lines down, and for the next several weeks tried to give context to them in this poem. I chose the simple rhyme scheme of 'aabb' based on the scheme 'given' me in the dream and adhered to tetrameter as the guiding meter for the same reason. Redemption is the poem's working theme.  

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Submitted by Vixility on October 06, 2022

Modified by Vixility on October 06, 2022

35 sec read
41

John W. May

John W. May has lived in Colorado all his life. He currently works in the field of ophthalmology and loves to mountain bike and read about history. John first became a lover of poetry in 2008 after having read a poem by John Milton. He has been reading and studying the works of various poets since. His favorite poets are Emily Dickinson, Fyodor Tyutchev and W. B. Yeats. more…

All John W. May poems | John W. May Books

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