Analysis of Blight
Give me truths,
For I am weary of the surfaces,
And die of inanition. If I knew
Only the herbs and simples of the wood,
Rue, cinquefoil, gill, vervain, and pimpernel,
Blue-vetch, and trillium, hawkweed, sassafras,
Milkweeds, and murky brakes, quaint pipes and sundew,
And rare and virtuous roots, which in these woods
Draw untold juices from the common earth,
Untold, unknown, and I could surely spell
Their fragrance, and their chemistry apply
By sweet affinities to human flesh,
Driving the foe and stablishing the friend,—
O that were much, and I could be a part
Of the round day, related to the sun,
And planted world, and full executor
Of their imperfect functions.
But these young scholars who invade our hills,
Bold as the engineer who fells the wood,
And travelling often in the cut he makes,
Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,
And all their botany is Latin names.
The old men studied magic in the flower,
And human fortunes in astronomy,
And an omnipotence in chemistry,
Preferring things to names, for these were men,
Were unitarians of the united world,
And wheresoever their clear eyebeams fell,
They caught the footsteps of the SAME. Our eyes
Are armed, but we are strangers to the stars,
And strangers to the mystic beast and bird,
And strangers to the plant and to the mine;
The injured elements say, Not in us;
And night and day, ocean and continent,
Fire, plant, and mineral say, Not in us,
And haughtily return us stare for stare.
For we invade them impiously for gain,
We devastate them unreligiously,
And coldly ask their pottage, not their love,
Therefore they shove us from them, yield to us
Only what to our griping toil is due;
But the sweet affluence of love and song,
The rich results of the divine consents
Of man and earth, of world beloved and lover,
The nectar and ambrosia are withheld;
And in the midst of spoils and slaves, we thieves
And pirates of the universe, shut out
Daily to a more thin and outward rind,
Turn pale and starve. Therefore to our sick eyes,
The stunted trees look sick, the summer short,
Clouds shade the sun, which will not tan our hay.
And nothing thrives to reach its natural term,
And life, shorn of its venerable length,
Even at its greatest space, is a defeat,
And dies in anger that it was a dupe,
And, in its highest noon and wantonness,
Is early frugal like a beggar's child:
With most unhandsome calculation taught,
Even in the hot pursuit of the best aims
And prizes of ambition, checks its hand,
Like Alpine cataracts, frozen as they leaped,
Chilled with a miserly comparison
Of the toy's purchase with the length of life.
Scheme | Text too long |
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Poetic Form | |
Metre | 111 1111010100 0111111 100101101 111101 1101110 101011101 01010011011 1011010101 0101011101 1100110001 1101001101 10010101 1101011101 1011010101 0101010100 1101010 11110101101 1101011101 01001000111 11010110111 0111001101 01110100010 0101000100 0101000100 0101111101 01100101 011111 1101101101 1111110101 0101010101 0101010101 0101001101 0101100100 10101001101 0100011111 11011111 11011 010111111 111111111 10111010111 1011001101 0101100101 11011101010 0100010101 0001110111 010101011 1010110101 1101111011 0101110101 11011111101 01011111001 0111110001 10111011001 0101011101 00110101 110101011 1110101 10001011011 0101010111 111010111 1101000100 1011010111 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 2,551 |
Words | 466 |
Sentences | 9 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 63 |
Lines Amount | 63 |
Letters per line (avg) | 32 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 2,047 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 463 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 2:20 min read
- 95 Views
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"Blight" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 4 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/29789/blight>.
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