Analysis of The Great Explosion
The universe expands and contracts like a great heart.
It is expanding, the farthest nebulae
Rush with the speed of light into empty space.
It will contract, the immense navies of stars and galaxies,
dust clouds and nebulae
Are recalled home, they crush against each other in one
harbor, they stick in one lump
And then explode it, nothing can hold them down; there is no
way to express that explosion; all that exists
Roars into flame, the tortured fragments rush away from each
other into all the sky, new universes
Jewel the black breast of night; and far off the outer nebulae
like charging spearmen again
Invade emptiness.
No wonder we are so fascinated with
fireworks
And our huge bombs: it is a kind of homesickness perhaps for
the howling fireblast that we were born from.
But the whole sum of the energies
That made and contain the giant atom survives. It will
gather again and pile up, the power and the glory--
And no doubt it will burst again; diastole and systole: the
whole universe beats like a heart.
Peace in our time was never one of God's promises; but back
and forth, live and die, burn and be damned,
The great heart beating, pumping into our arteries His
terrible life.
He is beautiful beyond belief.
And we, God's apes--or tragic children--share in the beauty.
We see it above our torment, that's what life's for.
He is no God of love, no justice of a little city like Dante's
Florence, no anthropoid God
Making commandments,: this is the God who does not care
and will never cease. Look at the seas there
Flashing against this rock in the darkness--look at the
tide-stream stars--and the fall of nations--and dawn
Wandering with wet white feet down the Caramel Valley to
meet the sea. These are real and we see their beauty.
The great explosion is probably only a metaphor--I know not
--of faceless violence, the root of all things.
Scheme | ABXCBXXXXXDBXXXXEX CBFGAXXDXXFECXHHGXXFXX |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 01001011011 110100101 11011101101 11100110110100 1101 1011110111001 1011011 01011101111111 110110101101 10110101010111 10011011100 10011110110101 110101 01100 1101111001 1 010111101110011 010111011 101110100 11001010100111 10010110100010 01111101010010 1101101 1010111011110011 011011011 011101001101001 1001 111000101 01111101010010 111011011111 111111110101010110 10111 1001011011111 0110111011 1001110010110 11100111001 100111110100101 101111011110 010101100100100111 11010001111 |
Closest metre | Iambic hexameter |
Characters | 2,048 |
Words | 331 |
Sentences | 15 |
Stanzas | 2 |
Stanza Lengths | 18, 22 |
Lines Amount | 40 |
Letters per line (avg) | 37 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 733 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 165 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:40 min read
- 124 Views
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"The Great Explosion" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 14 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/32878/the-great-explosion>.
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