Analysis of A Lost Friend
John Boyle O'Reilly 1844 (Dowth) – 1890 (Boston)
MY friend he was; my friend from all the rest;
With childlike faith he oped to me his breast;
No door was locked on altar, grave or grief;
No weakness veiled, concealed no disbelief;
The hope, the sorrow and the wrong were bare,
And ah, the shadow only showed the fair!
I gave him love for love; but, deep within,
I magnified each frailty into sin:
Each hill-topped foible in the sunset glowed,
Obscuring vales where rivered virtttes flowed.
Reproof became reproach, till common grew
The captious word at every fault I knew.
He smiled upon the censorship, and bore
With patient love the touch that wounded sore;
Until at length, so had my blindness grown,
He knew I judged him by his faults alone.
Alone, of all men, I who knew him best,
Refused the gold, to take the dross for test!
Cold strangers honored for the worth they saw;
His friend forgot the diamond in the flaw.
At last it came—the day he stood apart
When from my eyes he proudly veiled his heart;
When carping judgment and uncertain word
A stern resentment in his bosom stirred;
When in his face I read what I had been,
And with his vision saw what he had seen.
Too late! too late! Oh, could he then have known,
When his love died, that mine had perfect grown;
That when the veil was drawn, abased, chastised,
The censor stood, the lost one truly prized.
Too late we learn—a man must hold his friend
Unjudged, accepted, trusted to the end.
Scheme | AABBCC DDEEFFGGHH AAII JJKKDX HHLL MM |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 1111111101 111111111 1111110111 110101101 0101000101 010110101 1111111101 110110011 111100011 01011111 101011101 0111100111 110101001 1101011101 0111111101 1111111101 0111111111 0101110111 1101010111 1101010001 1111011101 1111110111 1101000101 0101001101 1011111111 0111011111 1111111111 1111111011 110111101 0101011101 1111011111 101010101 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,413 |
Words | 260 |
Sentences | 12 |
Stanzas | 6 |
Stanza Lengths | 6, 10, 4, 6, 4, 2 |
Lines Amount | 32 |
Letters per line (avg) | 34 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 182 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 43 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:18 min read
- 80 Views
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"A Lost Friend" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 29 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/21970/a-lost-friend>.
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