Analysis of Requiem
George Meredith 1828 (Portsmouth, Hampshire) – 1909 (Box Hill, Surrey)
Where faces are hueless, where eyelids are dewless,
Where passion is silent and hearts never crave;
Where thought hath no theme, and where sleep hath no dream,
In patience and peace thou art gone-to thy grave!
Gone where no warning can wake thee to morning,
Dead tho' a thousand hands stretch'd out to save.
Thou cam'st to us sighing, and singing and dying,
How could it be otherwise, fair as thou wert?
Placidly fading, and sinking and shading
At last to that shadow, the latest desert;
Wasting and waning, but still, still remaining.
Alas for the hand that could deal the death-hurt!
The Summer that brightens, the Winter that whitens,
The world and its voices, the sea and the sky,
The bloom of creation, the tie of relation,
All-all is a blank to thine ear and thine eye;
The ear may not listen, the eye may not glisten,
Nevermore waked by a smile or a sigh.
The tree that is rootless must ever be fruitless;
And thou art alone in thy death and thy birth;
No last loving token of wedded love broken,
No sign of thy singleness, sweetness and worth;
Lost as the flower that is drowned in the shower,
Fall'n like a snowflake to melt in the earth.
Scheme | ABXBCB CDCDCD AEFEFE AGFGXG |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 110111111 11011001101 11111011111 01001111111 11110111110 1101011111 1111110010010 1111101111 10010010010 1111101010 10010111010 01101111011 01011001011 01011001001 011010011010 11101111011 011110011110 101101101 011110110110 01101011011 111010110110 111111001 110101110010 1110111001 |
Closest metre | Iambic hexameter |
Characters | 1,155 |
Words | 212 |
Sentences | 8 |
Stanzas | 4 |
Stanza Lengths | 6, 6, 6, 6 |
Lines Amount | 24 |
Letters per line (avg) | 37 |
Words per line (avg) | 9 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 224 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 53 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:04 min read
- 69 Views
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"Requiem" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 28 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/15577/requiem>.
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