Analysis of A Ballad Of London - (To H. W. Massinsham)
Richard Le Gallienne 1866 (Liverpool) – 1947
Ah, London! London! our delight,
Great flower that opens but at night,
Great City of the Midnight Sun,
Whose day begins when day is done.
Lamp after lamp against the sky
Opens a sudden beaming eye,
Leaping alight on either hand,
The iron lilies of the Strand.
Like dragonflies, the hansoms hover,
With jewelled eyes, to catch the lover;
The streets are full of lights and loves,
Soft gowns, and flutter of soiled doves.
The human moths about the light
Dash and cling close in dazed delight,
And burn and laugh, the world and wife,
For this is London, this is life!
Upon thy petals butterflies,
But at thy root, some say, there lies
A world of weeping trodden things,
Poor worms that have not eyes or wings.
From out corruption of their woe
Springs this bright flower that charms us so,
Men die and rot deep out of sight
To keep this jungle-flower bright.
Paris and London, World-Flowers twain
Wherewith the World-Tree blooms again,
Since Time hath gathered Babylon,
And withered Rome still withers on.
Sidon and Tyre were such as ye,
How bright they shone upon the Tree!
But Time hath gathered, both are gone,
And no man sails to Babylon.
Ah, London! London! our delight,
For thee, too, the eternal night,
And Circe Paris hath no charm
To stay Time's unrelenting arm.
Time and his moths shall eat up all.
Your chiming towers proud and tall
He shall most utterly abase,
And set a desert in their place.
Scheme | Aabb ccdd eeff aagg hhii jjaa xxkk llxk Aamm nnfx |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Quatrain (80%) Etheree (33%) Tetractys (20%) |
Metre | 110101001 110110111 1101011 11011111 11010101 10010101 10011101 01010101 110110 11111010 01111101 11010111 01010101 10110101 01010101 11110111 0111010 11111111 01110101 11111111 11010111 111101111 11011111 11110101 100101101 1011101 1111010 01011101 10010111 11110101 11110111 0111110 110101001 11100101 0110111 1110101 10111111 1110101 1111001 01010011 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,389 |
Words | 260 |
Sentences | 16 |
Stanzas | 10 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4 |
Lines Amount | 40 |
Letters per line (avg) | 27 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 110 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 25 |
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Submitted on August 03, 2020
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:18 min read
- 7 Views
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"A Ballad Of London - (To H. W. Massinsham)" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 29 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/56457/a-ballad-of-london---%28to-h.-w.-massinsham%29>.
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