Analysis of Petals

Amy Lowell 1874 (Brookline) – 1925 (Brookline)



Life is a stream
On which we strew
Petal by petal the flower of our heart;
The end lost in dream,
They float past our view,
We only watch their glad, early start.

Freighted with hope,
Crimsoned with joy,
We scatter the leaves of our opening rose;
Their widening scope,
Their distant employ,
We never shall know. And the stream as it flows
Sweeps them away,
Each one is gone
Ever beyond into infinite ways.
We alone stay
While years hurry on,
The flower fared forth, though its fragrance still stays.


Scheme ABCABC DEFDEFGXHGXH
Poetic Form
Metre 1101 1111 101100101101 01101 111101 110111101 111 111 110011101001 11001 11001 11011001111 1101 1111 1001011001 1011 11101 01011111011
Closest metre Iambic trimeter
Characters 507
Words 93
Sentences 5
Stanzas 2
Stanza Lengths 6, 12
Lines Amount 18
Letters per line (avg) 22
Words per line (avg) 5
Letters per stanza (avg) 197
Words per stanza (avg) 46
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 17, 2023

27 sec read
102

Amy Lowell

Amy Lawrence Lowell was an American poet of the imagist school from Brookline, Massachusetts who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926. more…

All Amy Lowell poems | Amy Lowell Books

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