Analysis of Charles Sumner. (Birds Of Passage. Flight The Fourth)
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1807 (Portland) – 1882 (Cambridge)
Garlands upon his grave
And flowers upon his hearse,
And to the tender heart and brave
The tribute of this verse.
His was the troubled life,
The conflict and the pain,
The grief, the bitterness of strife,
The honor without stain.
Like Winkelried, he took
Into his manly breast
The sheaf of hostile spears, and broke
A path for the oppressed.
Then from the fatal field
Upon a nation's heart
Borne like a warrior on his shield!--
So should the brave depart.
Death takes us by surprise,
And stays our hurrying feet;
The great design unfinished lies,
Our lives are incomplete.
But in the dark unknown
Perfect their circles seem,
Even as a bridge's arch of stone
Is rounded in the stream.
Alike are life and death,
When life in death survives,
And the uninterrupted breath
Inspires a thousand lives.
Were a star quenched on high,
For ages would its light,
Still travelling downward from the sky,
Shine on our mortal sight.
So when a great man dies,
For years beyond our ken,
The light he leaves behind him lies
Upon the paths of men.
Scheme | ABAB CDCD XEXE FGFG HIHI JKJK LXLX MNMN HOHO |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Quatrain (89%) |
Metre | 10111 0100111 01010101 010111 110101 010001 01010011 010011 1111 011101 01110101 011001 110101 010101 110100111 110101 111101 01101001 01010101 1011001 100101 011101 101010111 110001 011101 110101 0000101 010101 001111 110111 110010101 1110101 110111 1101101 01110111 010111 |
Closest metre | Iambic trimeter |
Characters | 1,009 |
Words | 188 |
Sentences | 11 |
Stanzas | 9 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4 |
Lines Amount | 36 |
Letters per line (avg) | 23 |
Words per line (avg) | 5 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 90 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 21 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 57 sec read
- 127 Views
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"Charles Sumner. (Birds Of Passage. Flight The Fourth)" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 21 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/18545/charles-sumner.-%28birds-of-passage.-flight-the-fourth%29>.
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