Analysis of A Bronze Head

William Butler Yeats 1865 (Sandymount) – 1939 (Menton)



HERE at right of the entrance this bronze head,
Human, superhuman, a bird's round eye,
Everything else withered and mummy-dead.
What great tomb-haunter sweeps the distant sky
(Something may linger there though all else die;)
And finds there nothing to make its tetror less
i{Hysterica passio} of its own emptiness?

No dark tomb-haunter once; her form all full
As though with magnanimity of light,
Yet a most gentle woman; who can tell
Which of her forms has shown her substance right?
Or maybe substance can be composite,
profound McTaggart thought so, and in a breath
A mouthful held the extreme of life and death.

But even at the starting-post, all sleek and new,
I saw the wildness in her and I thought
A vision of terror that it must live through
Had shattered her soul.  Propinquity had brought
Imagiation to that pitch where it casts out
All that is not itself:  I had grown wild
And wandered murmuring everywhere, 'My child, my
child! '

Or else I thought her supernatural;
As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
On this foul world in its decline and fall;
On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave,
And wondered what was left for massacre to save.


Scheme ABABBXX XCXCXDD EFEFXGBG XBXBBHH
Poetic Form
Metre 1111010111 100100111 101100101 111110101 1011011111 0111011111 111111100 111110111 111111 1011010111 1101110101 1101011010 01010110001 0110011101 110101011101 1101000011 01011011111 11001111 11111111 1111011111 01010010111 1 111100100 1101011101 1111010101 111111111 0101110101 01010011101 010111110011
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 1,236
Words 223
Sentences 8
Stanzas 4
Stanza Lengths 7, 7, 8, 7
Lines Amount 29
Letters per line (avg) 34
Words per line (avg) 8
Letters per stanza (avg) 249
Words per stanza (avg) 56
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on May 02, 2023

1:06 min read
154

William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. more…

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