Analysis of Soul
Boris Pasternak 1890 (Moscow) – 1960 (Peredelkino)
My mournful soul, you, sorrowing
For all my friends around,
You have become the burial vault
Of all those hounded down.
Devoting to their memory
A verse, embalming them,
In torment, broken, lovingly
Lamenting over them,
In this our mean and selfish time,
For conscience and for quest
You stand-a columbarium
To lay their souls to rest.
The sum of all their agonies
Has bowed you to the ground.
You smell of dust, of death's decay,
Of morgue and burial mound.
My beggarly, dejected soul,
You heard and saw your fill;
Remembered all and mixed it well,
And ground it like a mill.
Continue pounding and compound
All that I witnessed here
To graveyard compost, as you did
For almost forty years.
Scheme | ABXX CDCD XEDE XBAB XFXF BXXX |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Quatrain (67%) |
Metre | 110111 111101 110101001 111101 01011100 010101 0110100 010101 011010101 110011 1101 111111 01111100 111101 11111101 1101001 110101 110111 01010111 011101 01010010 111101 1110111 11101 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 675 |
Words | 124 |
Sentences | 7 |
Stanzas | 6 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4 |
Lines Amount | 24 |
Letters per line (avg) | 23 |
Words per line (avg) | 5 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 91 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 20 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 37 sec read
- 90 Views
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"Soul" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 19 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/4534/soul>.
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