Analysis of The Fire of Drift-wood
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1807 (Portland) – 1882 (Cambridge)
DEVEREUX FARM, NEAR MARBLEHEAD.
We sat within the farm-house old,
Whose windows, looking o'er the bay,
Gave to the sea-breeze damp and cold,
An easy entrance, night and day.
Not far away we saw the port,
The strange, old-fashioned, silent town,
The lighthouse, the dismantled fort,
The wooden houses, quaint and brown.
We sat and talked until the night,
Descending, filled the little room;
Our faces faded from the sight,
Our voices only broke the gloom.
We spake of many a vanished scene,
Of what we once had thought and said,
Of what had been, and might have been,
And who was changed, and who was dead;
And all that fills the hearts of friends,
When first they feel, with secret pain,
Their lives thenceforth have separate ends,
And never can be one again;
The first slight swerving of the heart,
That words are powerless to express,
And leave it still unsaid in part,
Or say it in too great excess.
The very tones in which we spake
Had something strange, I could but mark;
The leaves of memory seemed to make
A mournful rustling in the dark.
Oft died the words upon our lips,
As suddenly, from out the fire
Built of the wreck of stranded ships,
The flames would leap and then expire.
And, as their splendor flashed and failed,
We thought of wrecks upon the main,
Of ships dismasted, that were hailed
And sent no answer back again.
The windows, rattling in their frames,
The ocean, roaring up the beach,
The gusty blast, the bickering flames,
All mingled vaguely in our speech;
Until they made themselves a part
Of fancies floating through the brain,
The long-lost ventures of the heart,
That send no answers back again.
O flames that glowed! O hearts that yearned!
They were indeed too much akin,
The drift-wood fire without that burned,
The thoughts that burned and glowed within.
Scheme | ABCBCDEDEFG FG XAHA IJIK LMLM NONO PXPX QJQK RSRS LJLK THTH |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 101110 11010111 110101001 11011101 11010101 11011101 01110101 0100101 01010101 11010101 01010101 101010101 101010101 111100101 11111101 11110111 01110111 01110111 11111101 1111101 01011101 0111101 111100101 01110101 1110111 01010111 11011111 011100111 01010001 110101101 110011010 11011101 01110101 01110101 11110101 111101 01110101 01010011 01010101 010101001 110100101 01110101 11010101 01110101 11110101 11111111 10011101 011100111 01110101 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,946 |
Words | 318 |
Sentences | 13 |
Stanzas | 11 |
Stanza Lengths | 11, 2, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4 |
Lines Amount | 49 |
Letters per line (avg) | 29 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 127 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 29 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on April 10, 2023
- 1:35 min read
- 148 Views
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"The Fire of Drift-wood" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 27 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/18854/the-fire-of-drift-wood>.
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