Analysis of Silence
Edgar Lee Masters 1868 (Garnett) – 1950 (Elkins Park)
I have known the silence of the stars and of the sea,
And the silence of the city when it pauses,
And the silence of a man and a maid,
And the silence of the sick
When their eyes roam about the room.
And I ask: For the depths,
Of what use is language?
A beast of the field moans a few times
When death takes its young.
And we are voiceless in the presence of realities --
We cannot speak.
A curious boy asks an old soldier
Sitting in front of the grocery store,
"How did you lose your leg?"
And the old soldier is struck with silence,
Or his mind flies away
Because he cannot concentrate it on Gettysburg.
It comes back jocosely
And he says, "A bear bit it off."
And the boy wonders, while the old soldier
Dumbly, feebly lives over
The flashes of guns, the thunder of cannon,
The shrieks of the slain,
And himself lying on the ground,
And the hospital surgeons, the knives,
And the long days in bed.
But if he could describe it all
He would be an artist.
But if he were an artist there would be deeper wounds
Which he could not describe.
There is the silence of a great hatred,
And the silence of a great love,
And the silence of an embittered friendship.
There is the silence of a spiritual crisis,
Through which your soul, exquisitely tortured,
Comes with visions not to be uttered
Into a realm of higher life.
There is the silence of defeat.
There is the silence of those unjustly punished;
And the silence of the dying whose hand
Suddenly grips yours.
There is the silence between father and son,
When the father cannot explain his life,
Even though he be misunderstood for it.
There is the silence that comes between husband and wife.
There is the silence of those who have failed;
And the vast silence that covers
Broken nations and vanquished leaders.
There is the silence of Lincoln,
Thinking of the poverty of his youth.
And the silence of Napoleon
After Waterloo.
And the silence of Jeanne d'Arc
Saying amid the flames, "Blessed Jesus" --
Revealing in two words all sorrows, all hope.
And there is the silence of age,
Too full of wisdom for the tongue to utter it
In words intelligible to those who have not lived
The great range of life.
And there is the silence of the dead.
If we who are in life cannot speak
Of profound experiences,
Why do you marvel that the dead
Do not tell you of death?
Their silence shall be interpreted
As we approach them.
Scheme | XXXXXXXXXXA BXXXXXCXBBDXXXECXXX FXXGHHIXXXXDIJ IXKKDXDCXGXXJXI EAXEXFX |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 1110101010101 001010101110 0010101001 0010101 11110101 011101 111110 011011011 11111 011100010110 1101 0100111110 1001101001 111111 0011011110 111101 011101011100 1111 01101111 0011010110 110110 01011010110 01101 00110101 00101001 001101 11110111 111110 1110110111101 111101 1101010110 00101011 00101101010 1101010100010 111110010 111011110 01011101 11010101 110101101010 0010101011 10011 11010011001 1010100111 1011100111 1101011011001 1101011111 00110110 101001010 11010110 1010100111 001010100 1010 00101111 100101110 01001111011 01101011 111101011101 0101000111111 01111 011010101 111101101 10101000 11110101 111111 110110100 11011 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 2,368 |
Words | 447 |
Sentences | 25 |
Stanzas | 5 |
Stanza Lengths | 11, 19, 14, 15, 7 |
Lines Amount | 66 |
Letters per line (avg) | 28 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 371 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 89 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on April 21, 2023
- 2:13 min read
- 522 Views
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"Silence" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 27 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/8719/silence>.
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