Analysis of Unnamed Lands
NATIONS ten thousand years before These States, and many times ten
thousand years before These States;
Garner'd clusters of ages, that men and women like us grew up and
travel'd their course, and pass'd on;
What vast-built cities--what orderly republics--what pastoral tribes
and nomads;
What histories, rulers, heroes, perhaps transcending all others;
What laws, customs, wealth, arts, traditions;
What sort of marriage--what costumes--what physiology and phrenology;
What of liberty and slavery among them--what they thought of death
and the soul;
Who were witty and wise--who beautiful and poetic--who brutish and
undevelop'd;
Not a mark, not a record remains--And yet all remains.
O I know that those men and women were not for nothing, any more than
we are for nothing; 10
I know that they belong to the scheme of the world every bit as much
as we now belong to it, and as all will henceforth belong to
it.
Afar they stand--yet near to me they stand,
Some with oval countenances, learn'd and calm,
Some naked and savage--Some like huge collections of insects,
Some in tents--herdsmen, patriarchs, tribes, horsemen,
Some prowling through woods--Some living peaceably on farms,
laboring, reaping, filling barns,
Some traversing paved avenues, amid temples, palaces, factories,
libraries, shows, courts, theatres, wonderful monuments.
Are those billions of men really gone?
Are those women of the old experience of the earth gone?
Do their lives, cities, arts, rest only with us? 20
Did they achieve nothing for good, for themselves?
I believe of all those billions of men and women that fill'd the
unnamed lands, every one exists this hour, here or elsewhere,
invisible to us, in exact proportion to what he or she grew
from in life, and out of what he or she did, felt, became,
loved, sinn'd, in life.
I believe that was not the end of those nations, or any person of
them, any more than this shall be the end of my nation, or of
me;
Of their languages, governments, marriage, literature, products,
games, wars, manners, crimes, prisons, slaves, heroes, poets,
I suspect their results curiously await in the yet unseen
world--counterparts of what accrued to them in the seen world.
I suspect I shall meet them there,
I suspect I shall there find each old particular of those unnamed
lands.
Scheme | XXAXXXXXXXXAXX XXXBX XXXXXXXX CCXX XDBXX EEXXXXXDXX |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 101101011101011 1010111 10101101101011110 1011011 11110110001011001 01 1100101001010110 111011010 111101011010001 11100010001111111 001 101001110000101100 010 10110010101101 111111010011101011 11110 111101101101100111 1110111011111011 1 0111111111 11101000101 11001011101011 1011010110 1101111010011 10010101 10101100110100100 1011100100100 111011101 111010101001011 11110111011 11011011101 1011111011010110 011100101110111 010011001010111111 10101111111101 1101 101111011110110101 1101111101111011 1 1110010010100010 111011011010 10110110000100101 1101101110011 10111111 10111111101001101 1 |
Closest metre | Iambic hexameter |
Characters | 2,573 |
Words | 380 |
Sentences | 11 |
Stanzas | 6 |
Stanza Lengths | 14, 5, 8, 4, 5, 10 |
Lines Amount | 46 |
Letters per line (avg) | 39 |
Words per line (avg) | 10 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 300 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 73 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:56 min read
- 136 Views
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"Unnamed Lands" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 19 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/38229/unnamed-lands>.
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