Analysis of The Party
Alice Duer Miller 1874 (New York) – 1942 (New York)
THE house is bright with lights and lights,
Like a palace in the Arabian Nights,
Lights in festoons and lights in clusters,
In chandeliers and crystal lustres;
And all the length of the stairs' broad way,
Tapestries green and pink and gray
Tell a story of ladies' bowers
Hung with apples and paved with flowers;
And beyond, an open arch discloses
An inner garden of palms and roses,
With lines of lilies against the walls,
And a fountain that falls - and waits - and falls.
And from the ballroom comes the beat
Of dance music and dancing feet,
And through the doorways of gold and glass
Figures of dancers pass and pass,
Lovely creatures in dripping laces,
And all have sad, unhopeful faces.
One person only yields to joy,
And he is a footman - a round-faced boy -
Stiff in a livery of black and green,
And he laughs at something heard or seen,
Laughs with a loud and lonely gladness,
Laughs perhaps at the dancers' sadness;
He only seemed for an instant gay,
And he was instantly sent away.
Scheme | AABACCBBDDEEFFGGHHIIJJAKCC |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 01111101 10100001001 10101010 0010101 010110111 10010101 101011010 111001110 0011101010 1101011010 111100101 0010110101 0101101 11100101 01011101 10110101 101001010 0111110 11010111 0110100111 1001001101 011110111 11010101 101101010 110111101 011100101 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 981 |
Words | 184 |
Sentences | 4 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 26 |
Lines Amount | 26 |
Letters per line (avg) | 30 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 780 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 182 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 55 sec read
- 105 Views
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"The Party" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 21 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/1480/the-party>.
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