Analysis of To A Woman Of Malabar
Charles Baudelaire 1821 (Paris) – 1867 (Paris)
Your feet are as slender as hands, your hips, to me,
wide enough for the sweetest white girl’s envy:
to the wise artist your body is sweet and dear,
and your great velvet eyes black without peer.
In the hot blue lands where God gave you your nature
your task is to light a pipe for your master,
to fill up the vessels with cool fragrance
and chase the mosquitoes away when they dance,
and when dawn sings in the plane-trees, afar,
fetch bananas and pineapples from the bazaar.
All day your bare feet go where they wish
as you hum old lost melodies under your breath,
and when evening’s red cloak descends overhead
you lie down sweetly on a straw bed,
where humming birds fill your floating dreams,
as graceful and flowery as you it seems.
Happy child, why do you long to see France
our suffering, and over-crowded land,
and trusting your life to the sailors, your friends,
say a fond goodbye to your dear tamarinds?
Scantily dressed, in muslins, frail,
shivering under the snow and hail,
how you’d pine for your leisure, sweet and free,
body pinned in a corset’s brutality,
if you’d to glean supper amongst our vile harms,
selling the scent of exotic charms,
sad pensive eyes searching our fog-bound sleaze,
for the lost ghosts of your coconut-trees!
Scheme | AABBCCDEFFGHIIJJEKLDMMAANNOO |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 111110111111 10110101110 101101101101 0111011011 001111111110 11111011110 1110101110 01001001111 0111001101 10100101001 111111111 111111001011 01101101101 111101011 110111101 11001001111 1011111111 10100010101 01011101011 10111111 1001011 100100101 1111110101 1010010100 111110011011 100110101 11011010111 101111101 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,241 |
Words | 225 |
Sentences | 6 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 28 |
Lines Amount | 28 |
Letters per line (avg) | 35 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 987 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 223 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:07 min read
- 88 Views
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