Analysis of Ploughing Time
Boris Pasternak 1890 (Moscow) – 1960 (Peredelkino)
What is the matter with the landscape?
Familiar landmarks are not there.
Ploughed fields, like squares upon a chessboard,
Today are scattered everywhere.
The newly-harrowed vast expanses
So evenly are spread about,
As though the valley had been spring-cleaned
Or else the mountains flattened out.
And that same day, in one endeavour,
Outside the furrows every tree
Bursts into leaf, light-green and downy,
And stretches skyward, tall and free.
No speck of dust on the new maples,
And colours nowhere are as clean
As is the light-grey of the ploughland
And as the silver-birch's green.
Scheme | XABA XCXC XDDD XEBE |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Quatrain (75%) |
Metre | 11010101 0101111 11110101 0111010 01011010 11001101 110101111 11010101 011101010 11011001 101111010 01010101 111110110 011111 11011101 01010101 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 577 |
Words | 97 |
Sentences | 7 |
Stanzas | 4 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4 |
Lines Amount | 16 |
Letters per line (avg) | 29 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 117 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 24 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on May 01, 2023
- 29 sec read
- 106 Views
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"Ploughing Time" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 29 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/4528/ploughing-time>.
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