Analysis of The Empty Niche
John Boyle O'Reilly 1844 (Dowth) – 1890 (Boston)
A KING once made a gallery of art,
With portraits of dead friends and living graced;
And at the end, 'neath curtains drawn apart,
An empty marble pedestal was placed.
Here, every day, the king would come, and pace
With eyes well-pleased along the statued hall;
But, ere he left, he turned with saddened face,
And mused before the curtained pedestal.
And once a courtier asked him why he kept
The shadowed niche to fill his heart with dole;
'For absent friends,' the monarch said, and wept;
'There still must be one absent to the soul.'
And this is true of all the hearts that beat;
Though days be soft and summer pathways fair,
Be sure, while joyous glances round us meet,
The curtained crypt and vacant plinth are there.
To-day we stand before our draped recess:
There is none absent—all we love are here;
To-morrow's hands the opening curtains press,
And lo, the pallid pediment is bare!
The cold affection that plain duty breeds
May see its union severed, and approve;
But when our bond is touched, it throbs and bleeds—
We pay no meed of duty, but of love.
As creeping tendrils shudder from the stone,
The vines of love avoid the frigid heart;
The work men do is not their test alone,
The love they win is far the better chart.
They say the citron-tree will never thrive
Transplanted from the soil where it matured;
Ah, would 'twere so that men could only live
Through working on where they had love secured!
'The People of the Book,' men called the Jews—
Our priests are truly ' People of the Word; '
And he who serves the Master must not choose—
He renders feudal service to the Lord.
But we who love and lose will, like the king,
Still keep the alcove empty in the hall,
And hope, firm-hearted, that some day will bring
Our absent one to fill his pedestal.
Scheme | ABAB CDCE FGFG HIHI JXJI KXKX LALA MNMN OXOX PDPE |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Quatrain (50%) Tetractys (20%) |
Metre | 0111010011 1101110101 0101110101 1101010011 11001011101 111101011 1111111101 010101100 01010011111 0101111111 110101101 1111110101 0111110111 111101011 1111010111 011010111 11110110101 1111011111 1110100101 01010111 0101011101 1111010001 11101111101 1111110111 110110101 0111010101 0111111101 0111110101 1101011101 0101011101 1111111101 1101111101 0101011101 10111010101 0111010111 1101010101 1111011101 110110001 0111011111 10101111100 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,770 |
Words | 328 |
Sentences | 11 |
Stanzas | 10 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4 |
Lines Amount | 40 |
Letters per line (avg) | 34 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 137 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 32 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:37 min read
- 129 Views
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"The Empty Niche" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 29 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/22053/the-empty-niche>.
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