Analysis of Railway To Hell
The Gypsy jumped from car to car,
never getting off the train
In Davenport through morning fog,
the old town looked the same
The prairies waited in the dark,
the Rockies far beyond
In Denver’s wind he heard the words
to an oft-forgotten psalm
The engine roared, the distance called,
the rails went on and on
The desert lit the night on fire,
to burn the right from wrong
A Reno stop to take on water,
drowning in the past
Through farms and fields and countryside,
to Stockton now at last
His feet stepped down to touch the earth,
and genuflect once more
Before reboarding, headed East
—perdition his true lord
(Bryn Mawr Pennsylvania: April, 2020)
Scheme | XX XX XX XX XX AX AB XB XX XX X |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 01011111 1010101 0101101 011101 01010001 010101 0111101 1110101 01010101 011101 010101110 110111 010111110 10001 1101010 110111 11111101 0111 011101 1111 11001010 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 631 |
Words | 116 |
Sentences | 1 |
Stanzas | 11 |
Stanza Lengths | 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 1 |
Lines Amount | 21 |
Letters per line (avg) | 25 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 47 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 11 |
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"Railway To Hell" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 2 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/53243/railway-to-hell>.
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