Analysis of Asphalt
Conrad Potter Aiken 1889 (Savannah, Georgia) – 1973 (Savannah, Georgia)
Light your cigarette, then, in this shadow,
And talk to her, your arm engaged with hers.
Heavily over your heads the eaten maple
In the dead air of August strains and stirs.
Her stone-white face, in the lamp-light, turns toward you;
Darkly, with time-dark eyes, she questions you
Whether this universe is what she thinks it—
Simple and passionate and profound and true—
Or whether, as with a sound of dim disaster,
A plaintive music brought to a huddled fall,
Some ancient treachery slides through the heart of things—
The last star falling, seen from the utmost wall…
And you—what sinister, far, reserves of laughter,
What understandings, remote, perplexed, remain
Unguessed forever by her who is your victim—
Victim, of whom you too are victim again?
…Come! let us dance once more on the ancient asphalt:
Seeing, beneath its strange and recent shape,
The eternal horror of rock, from which, for ever,
We toss our tortured hands, to no escape.
Scheme | XAXA BBXB CDXD CXXX XECE |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Quatrain (60%) |
Metre | 11011011 0110110110 100101101010 0011110101 011100111011 1011111101 1011011111 10010000101 110110111010 01010110101 110100110111 0111011011 011100101110 10010010101 10101011110 10111111001 11111110101 1001110101 0010101111110 11101011101 |
Closest metre | Iambic hexameter |
Characters | 947 |
Words | 162 |
Sentences | 6 |
Stanzas | 5 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4, 4 |
Lines Amount | 20 |
Letters per line (avg) | 37 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 149 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 32 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 48 sec read
- 133 Views
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"Asphalt" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 8 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/6980/asphalt>.
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