Analysis of Sonnet XL: My Heart the Anvil
Michael Drayton 1563 (Hartshill) – 1631 (London)
My heart the anvil where my thoughts do beat;
My words the hammers fashioning my desire;
My breast the forge including all the heat;
Love is the fuel which maintains the fire;
My sighs the bellows which the flame increaseth,
Filling mine ears with noise and nightly groaning;
Toiling with pain, my labor never ceaseth,
In grievous passions my woes still bemoaning;
My eyes with tears against the fire striving,
Whose scorching gleed my heart to cinders turneth,
But with these drops the flame again reviving,
Still more and more it to my torment turneth.
With Sisyphus thus do I roll the stone,
And turn the wheel with damned Ixion.
Scheme | ABABCDCDDCDCEF |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 1101011111 110101001010 1101010101 11010101010 110101011 10111101010 1011110101 01010111010 11110101010 1101111101 11110101010 110111111 11111101 010111010 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 639 |
Words | 112 |
Sentences | 3 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 14 |
Lines Amount | 14 |
Letters per line (avg) | 36 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 508 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 110 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 33 sec read
- 73 Views
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"Sonnet XL: My Heart the Anvil" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 8 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/28138/sonnet-xl%3A-my-heart-the-anvil>.
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