Analysis of Poetry

Boris Pasternak 1890 (Moscow) – 1960 (Peredelkino)



Yes, I shall swear by you, my verse,
I shall wheeze out, before I swoon:
You're not a tenor's shape and voice,
You're summer travelling third class,
You are a suburb, not a tune.

You're a street as close as May,
You're a battlefield at night,
Where clouds groan loudly in dismay
And scatter, when dismissed, in fright.

And, splitting in the railway's lace-
That's outskirts, not refrain and home-
They crawl back to their native place
Without a song, as if struck dumb.

The shower's offshoots stick in clusters
Till break of day, and all the time
They scribble on the roofs acrostics
And bubble up rhyme after rhyme.

All poetry is what you make it.
And even when the truism's not worth
The rhyme, the flow of verse is scared.
The notebook's open-so flow forth!


Scheme ABXXB CDCD EXEX XFAF XXXX
Poetic Form
Metre 11111111 11110111 1101101 11010011 11010101 1011111 101011 11110001 01010101 0100011 1110101 11111101 01011111 0111010 11110101 1101011 01011101 110011111 01010111 01011111 0110111
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 748
Words 139
Sentences 8
Stanzas 5
Stanza Lengths 5, 4, 4, 4, 4
Lines Amount 21
Letters per line (avg) 28
Words per line (avg) 7
Letters per stanza (avg) 117
Words per stanza (avg) 27
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 07, 2023

44 sec read
139

Boris Pasternak

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Russian poet, novelist, and literary translator. more…

All Boris Pasternak poems | Boris Pasternak Books

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    Which female American poet, who was little-known during her lifetime, but had nearly 1800 of her poems published posthumously, rarely titled her poems?
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    B Emily Dickinson
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