Analysis of Oh terrible, beloved! A poet's loving
Boris Pasternak 1890 (Moscow) – 1960 (Peredelkino)
Oh terrible, beloved! A poet's loving
Is a restless god's passionate rage,
And chaos out into the world comes creeping,
As in the ancient fossil age.
His eyes weep him mist by the ton,
Enveloped in tears he is mammoth-like,
Out of fashion. He knows it must not be done.
Ages have passed-he does not know why.
He sees wedding parties all around,
Drunken unions celebrated unaware,
Common frogspawn found in every pond
Ritually adorned as precious caviare.
Like some Watteau pearl, how cleverly
A snuffbox embraces all life's matter,
And vengeance is wreaked on him, probably
Because, where they distort and flatter,
Where simpering comfort lies and fawns,
Where they rub idle shoulders, crawl like drones,
He will raise your sister from the ground,
Use her like a bacchante from the Grecian urns,
And pour into his kiss the Andes' melting,
And morning in the steppe, under the sway
Of dusted stars, as night's pallid bleating
Bustles about the village on its way.
And the botanical vestry's dense blackness,
And all the ravine's age-old breath,
Waft over the ennui of the stuffed mattress,
And the forest's ancient chaos spurts forth
Scheme | ABAB CXCX DEXE FGFG HHDH AIAI HXHX |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Quatrain (57%) |
Metre | 11000101010 101011001 01010101110 10010101 11111101 0100111101 11101111111 101111111 111010101 101010001 101101001 1011101 11111100 010101110 0101111100 011101010 1110101 1111010111 111110101 1010110101 01011101010 0100011001 110111101 101010111 0001001110 0101111 110001010110 0010101011 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,140 |
Words | 193 |
Sentences | 8 |
Stanzas | 7 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4 |
Lines Amount | 28 |
Letters per line (avg) | 32 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 129 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 27 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:00 min read
- 82 Views
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