Analysis of The Rainbow

James Thomson 1700 (Port Glasgow) – 1748 (London)



Moist, bright, and green, the landscape laughs around.
Full swell the woods; their every music wakes,
Mix'd in wild concert, with the warbling brooks
Increased, the distant bleatings of the hills,
And hollow lows responsive from the vales,
Whence, blending all, the sweeten'd zephyr springs.
Meantime, refracted from yon eastern cloud,
Bestriding earth, the grand ethereal bow
Shoots up immense; and every hue unfolds,
In fair proportion running from the red
To where the violet fades into the sky.
Here, awful Newton, the dissolving clouds
Form, fronting on the sun, thy showery prism;
And to the sage-instructed eye unfold
The various twine of light, by thee disclosed
From the white mingling maze. Not so the boy;
He wondering views the bright enchantment bend,
Delightful, o'er the radiant fields, and runs
To catch the falling glory; but amazed
Beholds th' amusive arch before him fly,
Then vanish quite away.


Scheme ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSKT
Poetic Form
Metre 110101101 11011100101 10110101001 010101101 0101010101 1101010101 1111101 110101001 11010100101 0101010101 11010010101 1101000101 1101011110 0101010101 01001111101 10110011101 11001010101 010100100101 1101010101 111110111 110101
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 902
Words 150
Sentences 6
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 21
Lines Amount 21
Letters per line (avg) 35
Words per line (avg) 7
Letters per stanza (avg) 729
Words per stanza (avg) 148
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 19, 2023

45 sec read
75

James Thomson

James Thomson, who wrote under the pseudonym Bysshe Vanolis, was a Scottish Victorian-era poet famous primarily for the long poem The City of Dreadful Night, an expression of bleak pessimism in a dehumanized, uncaring urban environment. more…

All James Thomson poems | James Thomson Books

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