Analysis of To Monica Thought Dying
Francis Thompson 1859 (City of Preston, Lancashire) – 1907 (London)
You, O the piteous you!
Who all the long night through
Anticipatedly
Disclose yourself to me
Already in the ways
Beyond our human comfortable days;
How can you deem what Death
Impitiably saith
To me, who listening wake
For your poor sake?
When a grown woman dies
You know we think unceasingly
What things she said, how sweet, how wise;
And these do make our misery.
But you were (you to me
The dead anticipatedly!)
You--eleven years, was't not, or so? -
Were just a child, you know;
And so you never said
Things sweet immeditatably and wise
To interdict from closure my wet eyes:
But foolish things, my dead, my dead!
Little and laughable,
Your age that fitted well.
And was it such things all unmemorable,
Was it such things could make
Me sob all night for your implacable sake?
Yet, as you said to me,
In pretty make-believe of revelry,
So the night long said Death
With his magniloquent breath;
(And that remembered laughter
Which in our daily uses followed after,
Was all untuned to pity and to awe):
'A cup of chocolate,
One farthing is the rate,
You drink it through a straw.'
How could I know, how know
Those laughing words when drenched with sobbing so?
Another voice than yours, than yours, he hath!
My dear, was't worth his breath,
His mighty utterance?--yet he saith, and saith!
This dreadful Death to his own dreadfulness
Doth dreadful wrong,
This dreadful childish babble on his tongue!
That iron tongue made to speak sentences,
And wisdom insupportably complete,
Why should it only say the long night through,
In mimicry of you, -
'A cup of chocolate,
One farthing is the rate,
You drink it through a straw, a straw, a straw!'
Oh, of all sentences,
Piercingly incomplete!
Why did you teach that fatal mouth to draw,
Child, impermissible awe,
From your old trivialness?
Why have you done me this
Most unsustainable wrong,
And into Death's control
Betrayed the secret places of my soul?
Teaching him that his lips,
Uttering their native earthquake and eclipse,
Could never so avail
To rend from hem to hem the ultimate veil
Of this most desolate
Spirit, and leave it stripped and desecrate, -
Nay, never so have wrung
From eyes and speech weakness unmanned, unmeet;
As when his terrible dotage to repeat
Its little lesson learneth at your feet;
As when he sits among
His sepulchres, to play
With broken toys your hand has cast away,
With derelict trinkets of the darling young.
Why have you taught--that he might so complete
His awful panoply
From your cast playthings--why,
This dreadful childish babble to his tongue,
Dreadful and sweet?
Scheme | aabcddeeffgbgccbhhiggibbbff cceejjkLMn hhxeedopqraaLMnqrnkdxobbssbblmpirrpbxprbxpr |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Etheree (26%) Tetractys (21%) |
Metre | 11011 110111 1 010111 010001 01101010001 111111 11 1111001 1111 101101 11111 11111111 011110100 110111 011 1010111111 010111 011101 11101 110110111 11011111 100100 111101 0111111 111111 11111101001 111111 0101011100 101111 1111 0101010 101010101010 111110011 01110 110101 111101 111111 1101111101 0101111111 1111111 11010011101 11011111 1101 1101010111 1101111100 010101 1111010111 010011 01110 110101 1111010101 111100 1001 1111110111 101001 1111 111111 101001 001101 0101010111 101111 1001101001 110101 11111101001 111100 1001110001 110111 110110011 1111001101 110101111 111101 1111 1101111101 1101010101 1111111101 110100 11111 1101010111 1001 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 2,480 |
Words | 451 |
Sentences | 21 |
Stanzas | 3 |
Stanza Lengths | 27, 10, 43 |
Lines Amount | 80 |
Letters per line (avg) | 25 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 669 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 148 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 2:15 min read
- 27 Views
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"To Monica Thought Dying" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 4 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/13950/to-monica-thought-dying>.
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