Analysis of When The Millennium Comes

Katharine Lee Bates 1859 (Falmouth) – 1929 (Wellesley)



WHEN the Millennium comes
Only the kings will fight,
While the princes beat the drums,
And the queens in aprons white,
Arnica bottle in hand,
Watch their Majesties throw,
With a gesture vague and grand,
Their crowns at the dodging foe,
Poor old obsolete crowns
That Time hangs up in a row.
When the Millennium comes
And the proud steel navies meet,
While the furious boiler hums,
And the vengeful pistons beat,
The sailors will stay on shore
And cheer with a polyglot shout
The self-fed cannon that roar
Till metal has fought it out,
But the warm, glad bodies of boys
Are not for the waves to flout.
When the Millennium comes,
Love, the mother of life,
Will have worked out all the sums
Of our dim industrial strife,
And every man shall be lord
Of his deed and his dream, and the lore
Of war shall be abhorred
As a dragon-tale of yore,
Myth of the Iron Age,
A monster earth breeds no more.


Scheme AbabcdcdedAfafghghihAjajkgkglg
Poetic Form Etheree  (23%)
Metre 1001001 100111 1010101 0010101 11001 1111 1010101 1110101 11101 1111001 1001001 0011101 10100101 0010101 0101111 011001 0111011 1101111 10111011 1110111 1001001 101011 1111101 110101001 01001111 111011001 111101 1010111 110101 0101111
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 868
Words 168
Sentences 4
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 30
Lines Amount 30
Letters per line (avg) 23
Words per line (avg) 6
Letters per stanza (avg) 700
Words per stanza (avg) 166
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

50 sec read
43

Katharine Lee Bates

Katharine Lee Bates is remembered as the author of the words to the anthem America the Beautiful Bates was born in Falmouth Massachusetts and lived as an adult on Centre Street in Newton Massachusetts An historic plaque marks the site of her home The daughter of a Congregational pastor she graduated from Wellesley College in 1880 and for many years was a professor of English literature at Wellesley While teaching there she was elected a member of the newly formed Pi Gamma Mu honor society for the social sciences because of her interest in history and politics for which she also studied She lived at Wellesley with Katharine Coman who herself was a history and political economy teacher and founder of the Wellesley College Economics department The pair lived together for twenty-five years until Comans death in 1915 It is debated if this relationship was an intimate lesbian relationship as different sources maintain or a platonic relationship called sometimes Boston marriages as the local historical society of her birthplace maintain more…

All Katharine Lee Bates poems | Katharine Lee Bates Books

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