Analysis of Childhood
Rainer Maria Rilke 1875 (Prague) – 1926 (Montreux)
It would be good to give much thought, before
you try to find words for something so lost,
for those long childhood afternoons you knew
that vanished so completely -and why?
We're still reminded-: sometimes by a rain,
but we can no longer say what it means;
life was never again so filled with meeting,
with reunion and with passing on
as back then, when nothing happened to us
except what happens to things and creatures:
we lived their world as something human,
and became filled to the brim with figures.
And became as lonely as a sheperd
and as overburdened by vast distances,
and summoned and stirred as from far away,
and slowly, like a long new thread,
introduced into that picture-sequence
where now having to go on bewilders us.
Scheme | XXXX XXXX ABXB XXXXXA |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 1111111101 1111111011 11110111 110101001 1101001101 1111101111 11100111110 101001101 1111101011 0111011010 111111010 0011101110 0011101010 01101011100 0100111101 01010111 010111010 11101110101 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 728 |
Words | 133 |
Sentences | 4 |
Stanzas | 4 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 6 |
Lines Amount | 18 |
Letters per line (avg) | 33 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 147 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 33 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on May 03, 2023
- 40 sec read
- 423 Views
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"Childhood" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 29 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/29648/childhood>.
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