Analysis of The Mind’s Games
William Carlos Williams 1883 (Rutherford) – 1963 (Rutherford)
If a man can say of his life or
any moment of his life, There is
nothing more to be desired! his state
becomes like that told in the famous
double sonnet--but without the
sonnet’s restrictions. Let him go look
at the river flowing or the bank
of late flowers, there will be one
small fly still among the petals
in whose gauzy wings raised above
its back a rainbow shines. The world
to him is radiant and even the fact
of poverty is wholly without despair.
So it seems until these rouse
to him pictures of the systematically
starved--for a purpose, at the mind’s
proposal. What good then the
light winged fly, the flower or
the river--too foul to drink of or
even to bathe in? The 90 story building
beyond the ocean that a rocket
will span for destruction in a matter
of minutes but will not
bring him, in a century, food or
relief of any sort from his suffering.
The world too much with us? Rot!
the world is not half enough with us--
the rot of a potato with
a healthy skin, a rot that is
never revealed till we are about to
eat--and it revolts us. Beauty?
Beauty should make us paupers,
should blind us, rob us--for it
does not feed the sufferer but makes
his suffering a fly-blown putrescence
and ourselves decay--unless
the ecstasy be general.
Scheme | ABXCDXXXXXXXX XEXDAAFXXGAF GCXBXEXXXBXX |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 101111111 101011111 1011101011 011110010 10101010 100101111 101010101 11101111 11101010 0111101 1101101 11110001001 11001100101 1110111 1110100100 11010101 0101110 1110101 010111111 1011001010 010101010 1110100010 110111 110010011 01110111100 0111111 011110111 0110011 01010111 1001111011 10101110 1011110 1111111 111010011 11000111 00010101 01001100 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,223 |
Words | 235 |
Sentences | 13 |
Stanzas | 3 |
Stanza Lengths | 13, 12, 12 |
Lines Amount | 37 |
Letters per line (avg) | 26 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 326 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 78 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 30, 2023
- 1:10 min read
- 58 Views
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