Analysis of An Ancient Gesture
Edna St. Vincent Millay 1892 (Rockland) – 1950 (Austerlitz)
I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:
Penelope did this too.
And more than once: you can't keep weaving all day
And undoing it all through the night;
Your arms get tired, and the back of your neck gets tight;
And along towards morning, when you think it will never be light,
And your husband has been gone, and you don't know where, for years.
Suddenly you burst into tears;
There is simply nothing else to do.
And I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:
This is an ancient gesture, authentic, antique,
In the very best tradition, classic, Greek;
Ulysses did this too.
But only as a gesture,—a gesture which implied
To the assembled throng that he was much too moved to speak.
He learned it from Penelope...
Penelope, who really cried.
Scheme | ABXCCCXXB ADDBEDXE |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 111111110101110 0100111 01111111011 001011101 1111000111111 0010110111111011 01101110111111 10011011 111010111 0111111110101110 111101001001 00101010101 010111 1101010010101 10010111111111 11110100 01001101 |
Closest metre | Iambic hexameter |
Characters | 765 |
Words | 147 |
Sentences | 8 |
Stanzas | 2 |
Stanza Lengths | 9, 8 |
Lines Amount | 17 |
Letters per line (avg) | 35 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 298 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 72 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on April 17, 2023
- 44 sec read
- 467 Views
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