Analysis of What the Birds Said
The birds against the April wind
Flew northward, singing as they flew;
They sang, "The land we leave behind
Has swords for corn-blades, blood for dew."
"O wild-birds, flying from the South,
What saw and heard ye, gazing down?"
"We saw the mortar's upturned mouth,
The sickened camp, the blazing town!
"Beneath the bivouac's starry lamps,
We saw your march-worn children die;
In shrouds of moss, in cypress swamps,
We saw your dead uncoffined lie.
"We heard the starving prisoner's sighs
And saw, from line and trench, your sons
Follow our flight with home-sick eyes
Beyond the battery's smoking guns."
"And heard and saw ye only wrong
And pain," I cried, "O wing-worn flocks?"
"We heard," they sang, "the freedman's song,
The crash of Slavery's broken locks!
"We saw from new, uprising States
The treason-nursing mischief spurned,
As, crowding Freedom's ample gates,
The long-estranged and lost returned.
"O'er dusky faces, seamed and old,
And hands horn-hard with unpaid toil,
With hope in every rustling fold,
We saw your star-dropt flag uncoil.
"And struggling up through sounds accursed,
A grateful murmur clomb the air;
A whisper scarcely heard at first,
It filled the listening heavens with prayer.
"And sweet and far, as from a star,
Replied a voice which shall not cease,
Till, drowning all the noise of war,
It sings the blessed song of peace!"
So to me, in a doubtful day
Of chill and slowly greening spring,
Low stooping from the cloudy gray,
The wild-birds sang or seemed to sing.
They vanished in the misty air,
The song went with them in their flight;
But lo! they left the sunset fair,
And in the evening there was light.
Scheme | ABAB CDCD XEXE FGFG HIHI JKJK LMLM ANXN XOXO PQPQ NRNR |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Quatrain |
Metre | 01010101 11010111 11011101 11111111 11110101 11011101 110111 01010101 0101101 11111101 01110101 111111 110101001 01110111 101011111 0101101 01011101 01111111 11110101 0111101 11110101 01010101 11010101 01010101 10110101 01111011 110100101 1111111 01001111 01010101 01010111 1101001011 01011101 01011111 11010111 1101111 11100101 11010101 11010101 01111111 11000101 01111011 1111011 00010111 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,644 |
Words | 288 |
Sentences | 15 |
Stanzas | 11 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4 |
Lines Amount | 44 |
Letters per line (avg) | 29 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 115 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 25 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on May 02, 2023
- 1:26 min read
- 70 Views
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"What the Birds Said" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 13 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/23280/what-the-birds-said>.
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