Analysis of Flower-De-Luce: Killed At The Ford
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1807 (Portland) – 1882 (Cambridge)
He is dead, the beautiful youth,
The heart of honor, the tongue of truth,
He, the life and light of us all,
Whose voice was blithe as a bugle-call,
Whom all eyes followed with one consent,
The cheer of whose laugh, and whose pleasant word,
Hushed all murmurs of discontent.
Only last night, as we rode along,
Down the dark of the mountain gap,
To visit the picket-guard at the ford,
Little dreaming of any mishap,
He was humming the words of some old song:
'Two red roses he had on his cap
And another he bore at the point of his sword.'
Sudden and swift a whistling ball
Came out of a wood, and the voice was still;
Something I heard in the darkness fall,
And for a moment my blood grew chill;
I spoke in a whisper, as he who speaks
In a room where some one is lying dead;
But he made no answer to what I said.
We lifted him up to his saddle again,
And through the mire and the mist and the rain
Carried him back to the silent camp,
And laid him as if asleep on his bed;
And I saw by the light of the surgeon's lamp
Two white roses upon his cheeks,
And one, just over his heart, blood red!
And I saw in a vision how far and fleet
That fatal bullet went speeding forth,
Till it reached a town in the distant North,
Till it reached a house in a sunny street,
Till it reached a heart that ceased to beat
Without a murmur, without a cry;
And a bell was tolled in that far-off town,
For one who had passed from cross to crown,
And the neighbors wondered that she should die.
Scheme | AABBCXC DEFEDEF BGBGHII XXJIJHI KLLKKMNNM |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 11101001 011100111 10101111 111110101 111101101 0111101101 11101001 101111101 10110101 1100101101 10101101 1110011111 111011111 001011101111 10010101 1110100111 101100101 010101111 1100101111 0011111101 1111101111 11011111001 0101001001 101110101 0111101111 01110110101 11100111 011101111 01100101101 110101101 1110100101 1110100101 111011111 010100101 0011101111 111111111 0010101111 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,442 |
Words | 297 |
Sentences | 6 |
Stanzas | 5 |
Stanza Lengths | 7, 7, 7, 7, 9 |
Lines Amount | 37 |
Letters per line (avg) | 31 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 226 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 59 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:29 min read
- 90 Views
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"Flower-De-Luce: Killed At The Ford" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 11 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/18598/flower-de-luce%3A-killed-at-the-ford>.
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