Analysis of The Need to Love
Alan Seeger 1888 (New York City) – 1916
The need to love that all the stars obey
Entered my heart and banished all beside.
Bare were the gardens where I used to stray;
Faded the flowers that one time satisfied.
Before the beauty of the west on fire,
The moonlit hills from cloister-casements viewed
Cloud-like arose the image of desire,
And cast out peace and maddened solitude.
I sought the City and the hopes it held:
With smoke and brooding vapors intercurled,
As the thick roofs and walls close-paralleled
Shut out the fair horizons of the world---
A truant from the fields and rustic joy,
In my changed thought that image even so
Shut out the gods I worshipped as a boy
And all the pure delights I used to know.
Often the veil has trembled at some tide
Of lovely reminiscence and revealed
How much of beauty Nature holds beside
Sweet lips that sacrifice and arms that yield:
Clouds, window-framed, beyond the huddled eaves
When summer cumulates their golden chains,
Or from the parks the smell of burning leaves,
Fragrant of childhood in the country lanes,
An organ-grinder's melancholy tune
In rainy streets, or from an attic sill
The blue skies of a windy afternoon
Where our kites climbed once from some grassy hill:
And my soul once more would be wrapped entire
In the pure peace and blessing of those years.
Before the fierce infection of Desire
Had ravaged all the flesh. Through starting tears
Shone that lost Paradise; but, if it did,
Again ere long the prison-shades would fall
That Youth condemns itself to walk amid,
So narrow, but so beautiful withal.
And I have followed Fame with less devotion,
And kept no real ambition but to see
Rise from the foam of Nature's sunlit ocean
My dream of palpable divinity;
And aught the world contends for to mine eye
Seemed not so real a meaning of success
As only once to clasp before I die
My vision of embodied happiness.
Scheme | ABAB CDCD EBEX FGFG BHBH IJIJ KLKL CXCX MXML NONO PXPX |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Quatrain (73%) |
Metre | 0111110101 1011010101 1001011111 1001011110 01010101110 01111011 11010101010 01110110 1101000111 11010101 101101110 1101010101 0101010101 0111110101 1101110101 0101011111 1001110111 110010001 1111010101 111100111 1101010101 11011101 1101011101 101100101 11011001 0101111101 011101001 11011111101 01111111010 0011010111 01010101010 1101011101 111101111 0111010111 1101011101 110111001 01110111010 0111010111 1101110110 1111000100 0101011111 1111010101 1101110111 1101010100 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,803 |
Words | 328 |
Sentences | 9 |
Stanzas | 11 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4 |
Lines Amount | 44 |
Letters per line (avg) | 33 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 134 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 30 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:39 min read
- 98 Views
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"The Need to Love" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 30 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/346/the-need-to-love>.
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