Analysis of The Stranger (La Extranjera)

Gabriela Mistral 1889 (Vicuña) – 1957 (Hempstead)



She speaks in her way of her savage seas
With unknown algae and unknown sands;
She prays to a formless, weightless God,
Aged, as if dying.
In our garden now so strange,
She has planted cactus and alien grass.
The desert zephyr fills her with its breath
And she has loved with a fierce, white passion
She never speaks of, for if she were to tell
It would be like the face of unknown stars.
Among us she may live for eighty years,
Yet always as if newly come,
Speaking a tongue that plants and whines
Only by tiny creatures understood.
And she will die here in our midst
One night of utmost suffering,
With only her fate as a pillow,
And death, silent and strang.


Scheme ABCDEFGHIJKLMNODPQ
Poetic Form
Metre 1100110101 101100011 11101101 11110 01010111 11101001001 0101010111 0111101110 11011111011 1111011011 0111111101 1111101 10011101 101101001 011110101 1111100 110011010 011001
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 652
Words 128
Sentences 6
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 18
Lines Amount 18
Letters per line (avg) 29
Words per line (avg) 7
Letters per stanza (avg) 519
Words per stanza (avg) 126
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 20, 2023

38 sec read
161

Gabriela Mistral

Gabriela Mistral was the pseudonym of Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, a Chilean poet-diplomat, educator and feminist who was the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1945. more…

All Gabriela Mistral poems | Gabriela Mistral Books

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