Analysis of Sea Poppies

Hilda Doolittle 1886 (Bethlehem, Pennsylvania) – 1961 (Zurich)



Amber husk
fluted with gold,
fruit on the sand
marked with a rich grain,

treasure
spilled near the shrub-pines
to bleach on the boulders:

your stalk has caught root
among wet pebbles
and drift flung by the sea
and grated shells
and split conch-shells.

Beautiful, wide-spread,
fire upon leaf,
what meadow yields
so fragrant a leaf
as your bright leaf?


Scheme XXXX XXX XXXAA XBXBB
Poetic Form
Metre 101 111 1101 11011 10 11011 111010 11111 01110 011101 0101 0111 10011 10011 111 11001 1111
Closest metre Iambic dimeter
Characters 358
Words 62
Sentences 3
Stanzas 4
Stanza Lengths 4, 3, 5, 5
Lines Amount 17
Letters per line (avg) 16
Words per line (avg) 4
Letters per stanza (avg) 70
Words per stanza (avg) 15
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 20, 2023

18 sec read
107

Hilda Doolittle

Hilda Doolittle was an American poet, novelist, and memoirist, associated with the early 20th century avant-garde Imagist group of poets, including Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington. She published under the pen name H. D. Hilda was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1886, and grew up just outside Philadelphia in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, and attended Bryn Mawr College. She moved to London in 1911, where she played a central role within the then-emerging Imagist movement. Young and charismatic, she was championed by the modernist poet Ezra Pound, who was instrumental in building her career. From 1916–17, she acted as the literary editor of the Egoist journal, while her poetry appeared in the English Review and the Transatlantic Review.  more…

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