Analysis of An Old Picture
John Boyle O'Reilly 1844 (Dowth) – 1890 (Boston)
THERE are times when a dream delicious
Steals into a musing hour,
Like a face with love capricious
That peeps from a woodland bower;
And one dear scene comes changeless;
A wooded hill and a river;
A deep, cool bend, where the lilies end,
And the elm-tree shadows quiver.
And I lie on the brink there, dreaming
That the life I live is a dream;
That the real is but the seeming,
And the true is the sun-flecked stream.
Beneath me, the perch and the bream sail past
In the dim cool depths of the river;
The struggling fly breaks the mirrored sky
And the elm-tree shadows quiver.
There are voices of children away on the hill;
There are bees thro' the flag-flowers humming;
The lighter-man calls to the lock, and the mill
On the farther side is drumming.
And I sink to sleep in my dream of a dream,
In the grass by the brink of a river,
Where the voices blend and the lilies end
And the elm-tree shadows quiver.
Like a gift from the past is the kindly dream,
For the sorrow and passion and pain
Are adrift like the leaves on the breast of the stream,
And the child-life comes again.
O, the sweet sweet pain of a joy that died—
Of a pain that is joy forever!
O, the life that died in the stormy tide
That was once my sun-flecked river.
Scheme | abababcB dedexbxB fdfdebcB exexgbgb |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 111101010 10101010 10111010 1110110 011111 01010010 011110101 0011110 011101110 10111101 10111010 00110111 0110100111 001111010 0100110101 0011110 111011001101 1111011010 01011101001 10101110 01111011101 0011011010 1010100101 0011110 10110110101 101001001 101101101101 0011101 1011110111 101111010 1011100101 11111110 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,233 |
Words | 239 |
Sentences | 9 |
Stanzas | 4 |
Stanza Lengths | 8, 8, 8, 8 |
Lines Amount | 32 |
Letters per line (avg) | 30 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 239 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 59 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:11 min read
- 128 Views
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"An Old Picture" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 16 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/21983/an-old-picture>.
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