Analysis of Poetry
Marianne Moore 1887 (Kirkwood) – 1972 (New York City)
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all
this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf
under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that
feels a
flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician--
nor is it valid
to discriminate against 'business documents and
school-books'; all these phenomena are important. One must
make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
'literalists of
the imagination'--above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them', shall
we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.
Scheme | XABCBDDE XXXAFXGX XXGEXBXH XBEFFIIX XXJCHJF |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 1101111111010011 110 10110100101111 0100 11010110100 11111 11011111 1111110101010 1100010111011101 11 101101101001101 01000 011111111111 11011 1100101 1011111011101 110010011100101001 10 01001001010111011 10 101 110010 11110 101001101000 11110100101011 10010 10110110011100 0111100 1101001111 11 0101 100001000110 1010010010111011 11 100111011011 01010011000 11100 11110101 100111000100 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,346 |
Words | 242 |
Sentences | 7 |
Stanzas | 5 |
Stanza Lengths | 8, 8, 8, 8, 7 |
Lines Amount | 39 |
Letters per line (avg) | 28 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 217 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 48 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on May 01, 2023
- 1:12 min read
- 413 Views
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"Poetry" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 27 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/26355/poetry>.
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