Analysis of The Vain Spell
Edith Nesbit 1858 (Kennington, Surrey ) – 1924 (New Romney, Kent)
THE house sleeps dark and the moon wakes white,
The fields are alight with dew;
'Oh, will you not come to me, Love, to-night?
I have waited the whole night through,
For I knew,
O Heart of my heart, I knew by my heart,
That the night of all nights is this,
When elm shall crack and lead shall part,
When moulds shall sunder and shot bolts start
To let you through to my kiss.'
So spake she alone in the lonely house.
She had wrapped her round with the spell,
She called the call, she vowed the vow,
And the heart she had pledged knew well
That this was the night, the only night,
When the moulds might be wrenched apart,
When the living and dead, in the dead of the night,
Might clasp once more, in the grave's despite,
For the price of a living heart.
But out in the grave the corpse lay white
And the grave clothes were wet with dew;
'Oh, will you not come to me, Love, to-night,
I have waited the whole night through,
For I knew
That I dared not leave my grave for an hour
Since the hour of all hours is near,
When you shall come to the hollow bower,
In a cast of the wind, in a waft of the Power,
To the heart that to-night beats here!'
The moon grows pale and the house sleeps still
Ah, God! do the dead forget?
The grave is white and the bed is chill,
But a guest may be coming yet.
But the hour has come and the hour has gone
That never will come again;
Love's only chance is over and done,
And the quick and the dead are twain, not one,
And the price has been paid in vain.
Scheme | abABBcdccd xexeacaac abABBfxffx ghghxxiix |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 011100111 0110111 1111111111 11100111 111 1111111111 10111111 11110111 111100111 1111111 1110100101 11101101 11011101 00111111 111010101 10111101 101001001101 111100101 10110101 110010111 00110111 1111111111 11100111 111 11111111110 1010111011 1111101010 0011010011010 10111111 011100111 1110101 011100111 10111101 101011001011 1101101 110111001 0010011111 00111101 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,488 |
Words | 304 |
Sentences | 10 |
Stanzas | 4 |
Stanza Lengths | 10, 9, 10, 9 |
Lines Amount | 38 |
Letters per line (avg) | 30 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 282 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 75 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:31 min read
- 90 Views
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"The Vain Spell" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 29 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/9020/the-vain-spell>.
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