Analysis of The Book of Annandale
Partly to think, more to be left alone,
George Annandale said something to his friends—
A word or two, brusque, but yet smoothed enough
To suit their funeral gaze—and went upstairs;
And there, in the one room that he could call
His own, he found a sort of meaningless
Annoyance in the mute familiar things
That filled it; for the grate’s monotonous gleam
Was not the gleam that he had known before,
The books were not the books that used to be,
The place was not the place. There was a lack
Of something; and the certitude of death
Itself, as with a furtive questioning,
Hovered, and he could not yet understand.
He knew that she was gone—there was no need
Of any argued proof to tell him that,
For they had buried her that afternoon,
Under the leaves and snow; and still there was
A doubt, a pitiless doubt, a plunging doubt,
That struck him, and upstartled when it struck,
The vision, the old thought in him. There was
A lack, and one that wrenched him; but it was
Not that—not that. There was a present sense
Of something indeterminably near—
The soul-clutch of a prescient emptiness
That would not be foreboding. And if not,
What then?—or was it anything at all?
Yes, it was something—it was everything—
But what was everything? or anything?
Tired of time, bewildered, he sat down;
But in his chair he kept on wondering
That he should feel so desolately strange
And yet—for all he knew that he had lost
More of the world than most men ever win—
So curiously calm. And he was left
Unanswered and unsatisfied: there came
No clearer meaning to him than had come
Before; the old abstraction was the best
That he could find, the farthest he could go;
To that was no beginning and no end—
No end that he could reach. So he must learn
To live the surest and the largest life
Attainable in him, would he divine
The meaning of the dream and of the words
That he had written, without knowing why,
On sheets that he had bound up like a book
And covered with red leather. There it was—
There in his desk, the record he had made,
The spiritual plaything of his life:
There were the words no eyes had ever seen
Save his; there were the words that were not made
For glory or for gold. The pretty wife
Whom he had loved and lost had not so much
As heard of them. They were not made for her.
His love had been so much the life of her,
And hers had been so much the life of him,
That any wayward phrasing on his part
Would have had no moment. Neither had lived enough
To know the book, albeit one of them
Had grown enough to write it. There it was,
However, though he knew not why it was:
There was the book, but it was not for her,
For she was dead. And yet, there was the book.
Thus would his fancy circle out and out,
And out and in again, till he would make
As if with a large freedom to crush down
Those under-thoughts. He covered with his hands
His tired eyes, and waited: he could hear—
Or partly feel and hear, mechanically—
The sound of talk, with now and then the steps
And skirts of some one scudding on the stairs,
Forgetful of the nerveless funeral feet
That she had brought with her; and more than once
There came to him a call as of a voice—
A voice of love returning—but not hers.
Whose he knew not, nor dreamed; nor did he know,
Nor did he dream, in his blurred loneliness
Of thought, what all the rest might think of him.
For it had come at last, and she was gone
With all the vanished women of old time,—
And she was never coming back again.
Yes, they had buried her that afternoon,
Under the frozen leaves and the cold earth,
Under the leaves and snow. The flickering week,
The sharp and certain day, and the long drowse
Were over, and the man was left alone.
He knew the loss—therefore it puzzled him
That he should sit so long there as he did,
And bring the whole thing back—the love, the trust,
The pallor, the poor face, and the faint way
She last had looked at him—and yet not weep,
Or even choose to look about the room
To see how sad it was; and once or twice
He winked and pinched his eyes against the flame
And hoped there might be tears. But hope was all,
And all to him was nothing: he was lost.
And yet he was not lost: he was astray—
Out of his life and in another life;
And in the stillness of this other life
He wondered and he drowsed. He wondered when
It was, and wondered if it ever was
On earth that he had known the other face—
The searching face, the eloqu
Scheme | ABCDEFXXXGHXIXXXJKLXKKXXFXEIIMIXNXXOXXPXXQXXXRKSQXSQXTTUXCXKKTR LXMXXGXDXXXXPFU XXVJXXBAUXXWXXXOENWQQVKXH |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 1011111101 110110111 0111111101 11110010101 0100111111 1111011100 0100010101 11110101001 1101111101 0101011111 0111011101 110001011 0111010100 100111101 1111111111 1101011111 111100101 1001010111 01010010101 11101111 0100110111 0101111111 1111110101 11011 01110100100 1111010011 111111011 111101110 11110110 1011010111 1011111100 1111111 0111111111 1101111101 1100010111 10001011 1101011111 0101010101 1111010111 1111010011 1111111111 1101000101 0100011101 0101010101 1111001101 1111111101 0101110111 1011001111 010001111 1001111101 1110011011 1101110101 1111011111 1111101110 1111110110 0011110111 1101010111 111110101101 1101010111 1101111111 101111111 1101111110 1111011101 1111010101 0100011111 1110110111 1101110111 1101010111 1101010100 0111110101 011111101 0101011001 1111100111 1111011101 0111010110 1111111111 1111011100 1111011111 1111110111 1101010111 0111010101 111100101 1001010011 10010101001 0101010011 0100011101 110111101 1111111111 0101110101 010110011 1111110111 1101110101 1111110111 1101110101 0111111111 0111110111 0111111101 1111000101 0001011101 1100111101 1101011101 1111110101 010101 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 4,410 |
Words | 850 |
Sentences | 29 |
Stanzas | 3 |
Stanza Lengths | 63, 15, 25 |
Lines Amount | 103 |
Letters per line (avg) | 33 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 1,133 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 282 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 28, 2023
- 4:15 min read
- 106 Views
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"The Book of Annandale" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 26 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/10033/the-book-of-annandale>.
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