Analysis of Chant To Sirius
Clark Ashton Smith 1893 (Long Valley Caldera) – 1961 (Pacific Grove)
What nights retard thee, O Sirius!
Thy light is as a spear,
And thou penetratest them
As a warrior that stabbeth his foe
Even to the center of his life.
Thy rays reach farther than the gulfs;
They form a bridge thereover,
That shall endure till the links of the universe
Are unfastened, and drop apart,
And all the gulfs are one,
Dissevered by suns no longer.
How strong art thou in thy place!
Thou stridest thine orbit,
And the darkness shakes beneath thee,
As a road that is trodden by an army.
Thou art a god,
In thy temple that is hollowed with light
In the night of infinitude,
And whose floor is the lower void;
Thy worlds are as priests and ministers therein.
Thou furrowest space,
Even as an husbandman,
And sowest it with alien seed;
It beareth alien fruits,
And these are thy testimony,
Even as the crops of his fields
Are the testimony of an husbandman.
Scheme | ABXXXABACDX AXEEXXCXXADXAEAD |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 1101111 111101 0111 101001111 101010111 11110101 11011 11011011010 110101 010111 111110 1111011 11110 00101011 10111101110 1101 0110111011 00111 01110101 11111010001 111 10111 01111001 111001 0111100 10101111 10100111 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 843 |
Words | 161 |
Sentences | 8 |
Stanzas | 2 |
Stanza Lengths | 11, 16 |
Lines Amount | 27 |
Letters per line (avg) | 25 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 341 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 80 |
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Submitted on August 03, 2020
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 48 sec read
- 5 Views
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