Analysis of A Poet To His Baby Son
James Weldon Johnson 1871 (Jacksonville) – 1938 (Wiscasset)
Tiny bit of humanity,
Blessed with your mother’s face,
And cursed with your father’s mind.
I say cursed with your father’s mind,
Because you can lie so long and so quietly on your back,
Playing with the dimpled big toe of your left foot,
And looking away,
Through the ceiling of the room, and beyond.
Can it be that already you are thinking of being a poet?
Why don’t you kick and howl,
And make the neighbors talk about
“That damned baby next door,”
And make up your mind forthwith
To grow up and be a banker
Or a politician or some other sort of go-getter
Or—?—whatever you decide upon,
Rid yourself of these incipient thoughts
About being a poet.
For poets no longer are makers of songs,
Chanters of the gold and purple harvest,
Sayers of the glories of earth and sky,
Of the sweet pain of love
And the keen joy of living;
No longer dreamers of the essential dreams,
And interpreters of the eternal truth,
Through the eternal beauty.
Poets these days are unfortunate fellows.
Baffled in trying to say old things in a new way
Or new things in an old language,
They talk abracadabra
In an unknown tongue,
Each one fashioning for himself
A wordy world of shadow problems,
And as a self-imagined Atlas,
Struggling under it with puny legs and arms,
Groaning out incoherent complaints at his load.
My son, this is no time nor place for a poet;
Grow up and join the big, busy crowd
That scrambles for what it thinks it wants
Out of this old world which is—as it is—
And, probably, always will be.
Take the advice of a father who knows:
You cannot begin too young
Not to be a poet.
Scheme | AXB BXXCXD XXXXEEXXD XXXXXXXAFCXXGXXXXX DXXXA FGD |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 10110100 111101 0111101 11111101 011111101100111 101010111111 01001 1010101001 11110101110110010 111101 01010101 111011 0111111 11101010 10010111011110 1101101 1011101001 0110010 11011011011 110101010 1010101101 101111 0011110 11010100101 00100100101 1001010 10111010010 1001011110011 11101110 110010 01011 11100101 01011110 010101010 100101110101 101001001111 111111111010 110101101 110111111 1111111111 0100111 1001101011 1100111 111010 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,604 |
Words | 297 |
Sentences | 11 |
Stanzas | 6 |
Stanza Lengths | 3, 6, 9, 18, 5, 3 |
Lines Amount | 44 |
Letters per line (avg) | 28 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 206 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 49 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on April 11, 2023
- 1:29 min read
- 144 Views
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"A Poet To His Baby Son" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 29 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/20691/a-poet-to-his-baby-son>.
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