Analysis of The Giant’s Ring
Robinson Jeffers 1887 (Allegheny) – 1962 (Carmel-by-the-Sea)
BALLYLESSON, NEAR BELFAST
Whoever is able will pursue the plainly
False immortality of not having lived in vain but leaving some
mark in the world.
Secretly mocking at his own insanity
He labors the same, he knows that no dead man's lip was ever
curled in self-scorn,
And immortality is for the dead.
Jesus and Caesar out of the bricks of man's weakness, Washington
out of the brittle
Bones of man's strength built their memorials,
This nameless chief of a knot of forgotten tribes in the Irish darkness
used faithfuller
Simpler materials: to diadem a hilltop
That sees the long loughs and the Mourne Mountains, with a ring
of enormous embankment, and to build
In the center that great toad of a dolmen
Piled up of ponderous basalt that sheds the centuries like raindrops.
He drove the labor,
And has earmarked already some four millenniums.
His very presence is here, thick-bodied and brutish, a brutal and
senseless will-power.
Immortality? While Homer and Shakespeare are names,
Not of men but verses, and the elder has not lived nor the
younger will not, such treadings of time.
Conclude that secular like Christian immortality's
Too cheap a bargain: the name, the work or the soul: glass beads
are the trade for savages.
Scheme | ABCDBEFGHIJKELMNFOEPQERSTJUV |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 111 010110101010 1010011101011101 1001 100101110100 110011111111110 1011 001001101 1001011011110100 11010 1111110100 110110110101001010 11 100010011001 1101100110101 1010010011 0010111101 1111000111010011 11010 011010110100 11010111100100100 10110 01001100111 111110001011110 10111111 0111001101 11010010110111 1011100 |
Closest metre | Iambic hexameter |
Characters | 1,206 |
Words | 211 |
Sentences | 9 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 28 |
Lines Amount | 28 |
Letters per line (avg) | 35 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 985 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 209 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:04 min read
- 129 Views
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