Analysis of Road and Hills
Stephen Vincent Benet 1898 (Bethlehem) – 1943 (New York City)
I shall go away
To the brown hills, the quiet ones,
The vast, the mountainous, the rolling,
Sun-fired and drowsy!
My horse snuffs delicately
At the strange wind;
He settles to a swinging trot; his hoofs tramp the dust.
The road winds, straightens,
Slashes a marsh,
Shoulders out a bridge,
Then --
Again the hills.
Unchanged, innumerable,
Bowing huge, round backs;
Holding secret, immense converse:
In gusty voices,
Fruitful, fecund, toiling
Like yoked black oxen.
The clouds pass like great, slow thoughts
And vanish
In the intense blue.
My horse lopes; the saddle creaks and sways.
A thousand glittering spears of sun slant from on high.
The immensity, the spaces,
Are like the spaces
Between star and star.
The hills sleep.
If I put my hand on one,
I would feel the vast heave of its breath.
I would start away before it awakened
And shook the world from its shoulders.
A cicada's cry deepens the hot silence.
The hills open
To show a slope of poppies,
Ardent, noble, heroic,
A flare, a great flame of orange;
Giving sleepy, brittle scent
That stings the lungs.
A creeping wind slips through them like a ferret; they bow and dance,
answering Beauty's voice . . .
The horse whinnies. I dismount
And tie him to the grey worn fence.
I set myself against the javelins of grass and sun;
And climb the rounded breast,
That flows like a sea-wave.
The summit crackles with heat, there is no shelter, no hollow from
the flagellating glare.
I lie down and look at the sky, shading my eyes.
My body becomes strange, the sun takes it and changes it, it does not feel,
it is like the body of another.
The air blazes. The air is diamond.
Small noises move among the grass . . .
Blackly,
A hawk mounts, mounts in the inane
Seeking the star-road,
Seeking the end . . .
But there is no end.
Here, in this light, there is no end. . .
Scheme | XABC CDXAXXXXEXXFBG XXX XXFFX XGXHXXGXXXXXXX DXGXXXX XXXHX EXXII I |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 11101 10110101 010100010 110010 1111000 1011 1101010111101 01110 1001 10101 1 0101 0101000 10111 10100110 01010 10110 11110 0111111 010 00011 111010101 0101001111111 01010 11010 01101 011 1111111 111011111 11101011010 01011110 011100110 0110 1101110 1010010 01011110 1010101 1101 010111110101101 10011 01111 01110111 11101011101 010101 111011 0101011111101101 011 111011011011 110011011101011111 1110101010 011001110 11010101 1 01110001 10011 1001 11111 10111111 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,825 |
Words | 324 |
Sentences | 35 |
Stanzas | 9 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 14, 3, 5, 14, 7, 5, 5, 1 |
Lines Amount | 58 |
Letters per line (avg) | 24 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 155 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 37 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 28, 2023
- 1:37 min read
- 35 Views
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"Road and Hills" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 30 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/35810/road-and-hills>.
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