Analysis of A Girls' Grave
What story is here of broken love,
What idyllic sad romance,
What arrow fretted the silken dove
That met with such grim mischance?
I picture you, sleeper of long ago,
When you trifled and danced and smiled,
All golden laughter and beauty's glow
In a girl life sweet and wild.
Hair with the red gold's luring tinge,
Fine as the finest silk,
Violet eyes with a golden fringe
And cheeks of roses and milk.
Something of this you must have been,
Something gentle and sweet,
To have broken your heart at seventeen
And died in such sad defeat.
Hardly one of your kinsfolk live,
It was all so long ago,
The tale of the cruel love to give
That laid you here so low.
Loving, trusting, and foully paid --
The story is easily guessed,
A blotted sun and skies that fade
And this grass-grown grave the rest.
Whatever the cynic may sourly say,
With a dash of truth, I ween,
Of the girls of the period, in your day
They had hearts at seventeen.
Dead of a fashion out of date,
Such folly has passed away
Like the hoop and patch and modish gait
That went out with an older day.
The stone is battered and all awry,
The words can be scarcely read,
The rank reeds clustering thick and high
Over your buried head.
I pluck one straight as a Paynim's lance
To keep your memory green,
For the lordly sake of old Romance
And your own, sad seventeen.
Scheme | ABAB CDCD EFEF GHIH XCXC JKJK LGLI MLML NONO BIBI |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Quatrain |
Metre | 110111101 1010101 110100101 111111 1101101101 1110101 11010011 0011101 11011101 110101 100110101 0111001 10111111 101001 1110111101 0101101 1011111 1111101 011010111 111111 1010011 01011001 01010111 0111101 10010111 1011111 10110100011 1111101 11010111 1101101 10101011 11111101 011100101 0111101 011100101 101101 11111011 1111001 10111101 0111101 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,371 |
Words | 253 |
Sentences | 11 |
Stanzas | 10 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4 |
Lines Amount | 40 |
Letters per line (avg) | 26 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 103 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 25 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:16 min read
- 128 Views
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"A Girls' Grave" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 29 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/28532/a-girls%27-grave>.
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