Analysis of Only a Smile
Mathilde Blind 1841 (Mannheim) – 1896 (London)
No butterfly whose frugal fare
Is breath of heliotrope and clove,
And other trifles light as air,
Could live on less than doth my love.
That childlike smile that comes and goes
About your gracious lips and eyes,
Hath all the sweetness of the rose,
Which feeds the freckled butterflies.
I feed my love on smiles, and yet
Sometimes I ask, with tears of woe,
How had it been if we had met,
If you had met me long ago,
Before the fast, defacing years
Had made all ill that once was well?
Ah, then your smiling breeds such tears
As Tantalus may weep in hell.
Scheme | ABAB CDCD EFEF XGXG |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Quatrain |
Metre | 1101101 11110001 01010111 11111111 1111101 01110101 11010101 1101010 11111101 01111111 11111111 11111101 01010101 11111111 11110111 11001101 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 561 |
Words | 108 |
Sentences | 5 |
Stanzas | 4 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4 |
Lines Amount | 16 |
Letters per line (avg) | 27 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 108 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 27 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 32 sec read
- 79 Views
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"Only a Smile" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 4 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/27043/only-a-smile>.
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