Analysis of My Grandmother's Love Letters
Harold Hart Crane 1899 (Garrettsville, Ohio) – 1932 (Gulf of Mexico)
There are no stars to-night
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.
There is even room enough
For the letters of my mother's mother,
Elizabeth,
That have been pressed so long
Into a corner of the roof
That they are brown and soft,
And liable to melt as snow.
Over the greatness of such space
Steps must be gentle.
It is all hung by an invisible white hair.
It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.
And I ask myself:
'Are your fingers long enough to play
Old keys that are but echoes:
Is the silence strong enough
To carry back the music to its source
And back to you again
As though to her?'
Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof
With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.
Scheme | XXXX ABXXCXX XXDD X XXAXXB EECB |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 111111 111100 1111110011 00110111 1110101 1010111010 0100 111111 01010101 111101 01001111 10010111 11110 111111010011 111111001 0111 111010111 1111110 1010101 1101010111 011101 1110 1111110101 111111101 01110001010101 110111010010 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 845 |
Words | 166 |
Sentences | 10 |
Stanzas | 6 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 7, 4, 1, 6, 4 |
Lines Amount | 26 |
Letters per line (avg) | 25 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 109 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 27 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 31, 2023
- 49 sec read
- 156 Views
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