Analysis of The Digging Skeleton
Charles Baudelaire 1821 (Paris) – 1867 (Paris)
I
In the anatomical plates
displayed on the dusty quays
where many a dry book sleeps
mummified, as in ancient days,
drawings to which the gravity
and skill of some past artist,
despite the gloomy subject
have communicated beauty,
you’ll see, and it renders those
gruesome mysteries more complete,
flayed men, and skeletons posed,
farm-hands, digging the soil at their feet.
II
Peasants, dour and resigned,
convicts pressed from the grave,
what’s the strange harvest, say,
for which you hack the ground,
bending your backbones there,
flexing each fleshless sinew,
what farmer’s barn must you
labour to fill with such care?
Do you seek to show – by that pure,
and terrible, emblem of too hard
a fate! – that even in the bone-yard
the promised sleep’s far from sure:
that even the Void’s a traitor:
that even Death tells us lies,
that in some land new to our eyes,
we must, perhaps, alas, forever,
and ever, and ever, eternally,
wield there the heavy spade,
scrape the dull earth, its blade
beneath our naked, bleeding feet?
Scheme | ABBCDEFGEHIJIAKLMNOPQORSSRTUUTEVVI |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 1 0001001 0110101 1100111 1010101 10110100 0111110 0101001 1010010 1101101 10100101 1101001 111001111 1 1010001 101101 001101 111101 10111 10111 110111 111111 11111111 010010111 011100011 0101111 11001010 1101111 101111101 110101010 0100100100 110101 101111 011010101 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,012 |
Words | 178 |
Sentences | 5 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 34 |
Lines Amount | 34 |
Letters per line (avg) | 24 |
Words per line (avg) | 5 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 800 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 176 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on April 09, 2023
- 53 sec read
- 132 Views
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