Analysis of Trees And The Menace Of Night
William Ernest Henley 1849 (Gloucester) – 1903 (Woking)
Trees and the menace of night;
Then a long, lonely, leaden mere
Backed by a desolate fell,
As by a spectral battlement; and then,
Low-brooding, interpenetrating all,
A vast, gray, listless, inexpressive sky,
So beggared, so incredibly bereft
Of starlight and the song of racing worlds,
It might have bellied down upon the Void
Where as in terror Light was beginning to be.
Hist! In the trees fulfilled of night
(Night and the wretchedness of the sky)
Is it the hurry of the rain?
Or the noise of a drive of the Dead,
Streaming before the irresistible Will
Through the strange dusk of this, the Debateable Land
Between their place and ours?
Like the forgetfulness
Of the work-a-day world made visible,
A mist falls from the melancholy sky.
A messenger from some lost and loving soul,
Hopeless, far wandered, dazed
Here in the provinces of life,
A great white moth fades miserably past.
Thro' the trees in the strange dead night,
Under the vast dead sky,
Forgetting and forgot, a drift of Dead
Sets to the mystic mere, the phantom fell,
And the unimagined vastitudes beyond.
Scheme | AXBXXCXDXX ACXEXXX DXCXXXX ACEBX |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 1001011 10110101 1101001 110110001 11011 0111011 111010001 110011101 1111010101 110101101011 10010111 1001101 11010101 101101101 1001001001 101111011 0111010 101 1010111100 011101001 01001110101 101101 10010011 0111110001 10100111 100111 0100010111 1101010101 00010101 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,052 |
Words | 188 |
Sentences | 8 |
Stanzas | 4 |
Stanza Lengths | 10, 7, 7, 5 |
Lines Amount | 29 |
Letters per line (avg) | 29 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 212 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 47 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 56 sec read
- 116 Views
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