Analysis of Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day
Delmore Schwartz 1913 (New York) – 1966
Calmly we walk through this April’s day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
Number provides all distances,
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,
Many great dears are taken away,
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn ...)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(... that time is the fire in which we burn.)
(This is the school in which we learn ...)
What is the self amid this blaze?
What am I now that I was then
Which I shall suffer and act again,
The theodicy I wrote in my high school days
Restored all life from infancy,
The children shouting are bright as they run
(This is the school in which they learn ...)
Ravished entirely in their passing play!
(... that time is the fire in which they burn.)
Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where are they now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
No more? No more?
From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,
Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume
Not where they are now (where are they now?)
But what they were then, both beautiful;
Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
Scheme | abbxabxcadEde EfGgfdxeae fhxghaicx ixabGgaee |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 10111111 0100100101 00111001 010100101 1000111001 010100001 10011100 111110101 101111001 11011101 11010111 010100100 1110100111 11010111 11010111 11111111 111100101 011101111 01111100 0101011111 11010111 1010001101 1110100111 10111101 111100100 111111101 11101 1111 1111110101 1100100101 111111111 111011100 110100101 0111001010 10010000101 11111111 11111111 11000101001 0101010101 11010111 110100111 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,648 |
Words | 325 |
Sentences | 21 |
Stanzas | 4 |
Stanza Lengths | 13, 10, 9, 9 |
Lines Amount | 41 |
Letters per line (avg) | 29 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 295 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 71 |
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Written on 1967
Submitted by Drone232 on April 08, 2022
Modified on April 26, 2023
- 1:37 min read
- 172 Views
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"Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 21 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/124478/calmly-we-walk-through-this-april%E2%80%99s-day>.
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