Analysis of Girl's Lament
Rainer Maria Rilke 1875 (Prague) – 1926 (Montreux)
In the years when we were
all children, this inclining
to be alone so much was gentle;
others' time passed fighting,
and one had one's faction,
one's near, one's far-off place,
a path, an animal, a picture.
And I still imagined, that life
would always keep providing
for one to dwell on things within,
Am I within myself not in what's greatest?
Shall what's mine no longer soothe
and understand me as a child?
Suddenly I'm as if cast out,
and this solitude surrounds me
as something vast and unbounded,
when my feeling, standing on the hills
of my breasts, cries out for wings
or for an end.
Translated by Edward Snow
Scheme | ABXBXXA XBXXXX XXXXXX X |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Etheree (25%) Tetractys (20%) |
Metre | 001110 11011 110111110 101110 011110 111111 011100010 01101011 111010 11111101 1101110110 1111101 0011101 10011111 0110011 11010010 111010101 1111111 1111 0101101 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 606 |
Words | 114 |
Sentences | 5 |
Stanzas | 4 |
Stanza Lengths | 7, 6, 6, 1 |
Lines Amount | 20 |
Letters per line (avg) | 24 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 120 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 28 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on April 18, 2023
- 36 sec read
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