Analysis of Light
Another drought morning after a too brief dawn downpour,
unaccountable silvery glitterings on the leaves of the withering maples—
I think of a troop of the blissful blessed approaching Dante,
"a hundred spheres shining," he rhapsodizes, "the purest pearls…"
then of the frightening brilliants myriad gleam in my lamp
of the eyes of the vast swarm of bats I found once in a cave,
a chamber whose walls seethed with a spaceless carpet of creatures,
their cacophonous, keen, insistent, incessant squeakings and squealings
churning the warm, rank, cloying air; of how one,
perfectly still among all the fitfully twitching others,
was looking straight at me, gazing solemnly, thoughtfully up
from beneath the intricate furl of its leathery wings
as though it couldn't believe I was there, or were trying to place me,
to situate me in the gnarl we'd evolved from, and now,
the trees still heartrendingly asparkle, Dante again,
this time the way he'll refer to a figure he meets as "the life of…"
not the soul, or person, the life, and once more the bat, and I,
our lives in that moment together, our lives, our lives,
his with no vision of celestial splendor, no poem,
mine with no flight, no unblundering dash through the dark,
his without realizing it would, so soon, no longer exist,
mine having to know for us both that everything ends,
world, after-world, even their memory, steamed away
like the film of uncertain vapor of the last of the luscious rain.
Scheme | XA BX XX CA XC XX XX XX XX XX XX BX |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 01011010011110 010010011011010010 111011010101010 01011011000101 11010011001011 101101111111001 01011110110110 111010010101 10011101111 100101101001010 110111101001001 10101001111001 11110011111010111 1101001101101 011111001 11011011010111011 101110010110101 1010110010101101 11110101010110 1111111101 101100111111001 110111111101 1101101100101 10110101010110101 |
Closest metre | Iambic octameter |
Characters | 1,470 |
Words | 275 |
Sentences | 1 |
Stanzas | 12 |
Stanza Lengths | 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2 |
Lines Amount | 24 |
Letters per line (avg) | 48 |
Words per line (avg) | 10 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 96 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 21 |
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Written on April 13, 1999
Submitted by Drone232 on April 07, 2022
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:23 min read
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"Light" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 28 Mar. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/123961/light>.
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