Analysis of In Collins Street
George Essex Evans 1863 (London) – 1909 (Toowoomba)
I stood in the heart of the city street,
I felt the throb of her pulses beat,
The thunder of life on the sunny air,
The waves of the people everywhere,
Like the stirring lilt of a mighty song
Ran the fever of life in the moving throng,
With the hope and joy and the want and woe
Of a million souls in its ebb and flow.
Like a floating straw in an eddy caught
My soul was whirled in the city’s thought—
The purse-born pride and the scheming brain,
The grinding need and the grasping gain;
The silent strength that is born to rule,
And the shallow laugh of the feckless fool,
The fresh young face where no shadow lies,
And the quenchless pain in the harlot’s eyes.
I stood in the heart of the city street,
And I heard not the tread of the passing feet,
For the days were grey and the nights were long,
And my soul was vexed with a wild sad song,
And the world like a stream flowed thro’ my brain,
And I saw her lands in a dream of pain,
And her power enthroned on the people’s needs,
And her heroes dead for a hundred creeds.
And I saw thro’ the pageant moving on
The same dark horrors of ages gone,
The dumb despair and the dire distress,
And man still mad in his littleness.
Who cares tho’ Earth be a masterpiece,
If pain and sorrow shall never cease?
Does God endure in His vaulted skies
The hopeless pain in His creatures’ eyes?
Then I saw, like a glory shining thro’,
What man had conquered and yet shall do.
I saw the depths where he lay of old,
And the heights of a splendour yet untold.
And I knew, in a flash, since the world began
What man had suffered and done for man,
And I felt like a note that is borne along
On the upward swell of a battle song.
Scheme | Aabbccddxxeeffgg Aacceehh xxxgiigg bxjjkkcc |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Tetractys (20%) Etheree (20%) |
Metre | 1100110101 110110101 0101110101 01101010 1010110101 10101100101 1010100101 1010101101 1010101101 11110011 011100101 010100101 010111111 0010110101 01111111 00110011 1100110101 01110110101 1010100101 0111110111 0011011111 0110100111 0010110101 0010110101 0111010101 011101101 010100101 0111011 11111010 110101101 110101101 010101101 1111010101 111100111 110111111 001101101 01100110101 111100111 01110111101 1010110101 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,650 |
Words | 332 |
Sentences | 10 |
Stanzas | 4 |
Stanza Lengths | 16, 8, 8, 8 |
Lines Amount | 40 |
Letters per line (avg) | 32 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 321 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 83 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:39 min read
- 114 Views
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"In Collins Street" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 30 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/14963/in-collins-street>.
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