Analysis of Confessions
Robert Browning 1812 (Camberwell) – 1889 (Venice)
What is he buzzing in my ears?
"Now that I come to die,
Do I view the world as a vale of tears?"
Ah, reverend sir, not I!
What I viewed there once, what I view again
Where the physic bottles stand
On the table's edge, -is a suburb lane,
With a wall to my bedside hand.
That lane sloped, much as the bottles do,
From a house you could descry
O'er the garden-wall: is the curtain blue
Or green to a healthy eye?
To mine, it serves for the old June weather
Blue above lane and wall;
And that farthest bottle labelled "Ether"
Is the house o'ertopping all.
At a terrace, somewhere near the stopper,
There watched for me, one June,
A girl; I know, sir, it's improper,
My poor mind's out of tune.
Only, there was a way... you crept
Close by the side, to dodge
Eyes in the house, two eyes except:
They styled their house "The Lodge".
What right had a lounger up their lane?
But, by creeping very close,
With the good wall's help, -their eyes might strain
And stretch themselves to Oes,
Yet never catch her and me together,
As she left the attic, there,
By the rim of the bottle labelled "Ether",
And stole from stair to stair,
And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas,
We loved, sir -used to meet:
How sad and bad and mad it was -
But then, how it was sweet!
Scheme | ABXB XCDC EFEB FGFG FHFH IJIJ DXDA FFFF XKXK |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Quatrain (89%) |
Metre | 11110011 111111 1110110111 1100111 1111111101 101101 1010110101 1011111 111110101 101111 10010110101 1110101 1111101110 101101 0110101010 10111 101011010 111111 011111010 111111 10110111 110111 10011101 111101 11101111 1110101 101111111 010111 1101001010 1110101 10110101010 011111 011011101 111111 11010111 111111 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,225 |
Words | 246 |
Sentences | 13 |
Stanzas | 9 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4 |
Lines Amount | 36 |
Letters per line (avg) | 26 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 104 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 27 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on April 25, 2023
- 1:15 min read
- 245 Views
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"Confessions" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 14 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/30338/confessions>.
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