Analysis of The Secret of the Universe
Edward Dowden 1843 (Cork) – 1913
AN ODE
(By a Western Spinning Dervish)
I SPIN, I spin, around, around,
And close my eyes,
And let the bile arise
From the sacred region of the soul’s Profound;
Then gaze upon the world; how strange! how new!
The earth and heaven are one,
The horizon-line is gone,
The sky how green! the land how fair and blue!
Perplexing items fade from my large view,
And thought which vexed me with its false and true
Is swallowed up in Intuition; this,
This is the sole true mode
Of reaching God,
And gaining the universal synthesis
Which makes All—One; while fools with peering eyes
Dissect, divide, and vainly analyse.
So round, and round, and round again!
How the whole globe swells within my brain,
The stars inside my lids appear,
The murmur of the spheres I hear
Throbbing and beating in each ear;
Right in my navel I can feel
The centre of the world’s great wheel.
Ah peace divine, bliss dear and deep,
No stay, no stop,
Like any top
Whirling with swiftest speed, I sleep.
O ye devout ones round me coming,
Listen! I think that I am humming;
No utterance of the servile mind
With poor chop-logic rules agreeing
Here shall ye find,
But inarticulate burr of man’s unsundered being.
Ah, could we but devise some plan,
Some patent jack by which a man
Might hold himself ever in harmony
With the great whole, and spin perpetually,
As all things spin
Without, within,
As Time spins off into Eternity,
And Space into the inane Immensity,
And the Finite into God’s Infinity,
Spin, spin, spin, spin.
Scheme | AX BCCBDXXDDDXAXXCCXXXEEFFGHHGIIJIJIKKLLMMLALM |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Tetractys (24%) |
Metre | 11 10101010 11110101 0111 010101 10101010101 1101011111 0101011 0010111 0111011101 0101011111 0111111101 110100101 110111 1101 0100010100 1111111101 01010101 11010101 101110111 01011101 01010111 10010011 10110111 01010111 11011101 1111 1101 10110111 110111110 101111110 110010101 111101010 1111 100100111110 11110111 11011101 1101100100 10110101000 1111 0101 1111010100 01010011 0010110100 1111 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,612 |
Words | 270 |
Sentences | 12 |
Stanzas | 2 |
Stanza Lengths | 2, 43 |
Lines Amount | 45 |
Letters per line (avg) | 26 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 578 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 134 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:21 min read
- 66 Views
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"The Secret of the Universe" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 29 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/9529/the-secret-of-the-universe>.
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