Analysis of On The Medusa Of Leonardo da Vinci In The Florentine Gallery
Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792 (Horsham) – 1822 (Lerici)
I.
It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky,
Upon the cloudy mountain-peak supine;
Below, far lands are seen tremblingly;
Its horror and its beauty are divine.
Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie
Loveliness like a shadow, from which shine,
Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,
The agonies of anguish and of death.
II.
Yet it is less the horror than the grace
Which turns the gazer's spirit into stone,
Whereon the lineaments of that dead face
Are graven, till the characters be grown
Into itself, and thought no more can trace;
’Tis the melodious hue of beauty thrown
Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain,
Which humanize and harmonize the strain.
III.
And from its head as from one body grow,
As grass out of a watery rock,
Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow
And their long tangles in each other lock,
And with unending involutions show
Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock
The torture and the death within, and saw
The solid air with many a ragged jaw.
IV.
And, from a stone beside, a poisonous eft
Peeps idly into those Gorgonian eyes;
Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft
Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise
Out of the cave this hideous light had cleft,
And he comes hastening like a moth that hies
After a taper; and the midnight sky
Flares, a light more dread than obscurity.
V.
'Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror;
For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare
Kindled by that inextricable error,
Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air
Become a and ever-shifting mirror
Of all the beauty and the terror there--
A woman’s countenance, with serpent-locks,
Gazing in death on Heaven from those wet rocks.
Scheme | AABCBABXX ADEDEDEFF AGHCHGHII JKLKLKDAK JMNMNMNOO |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Tetractys (29%) |
Metre | 1 11101011 0101010101 0111111 1100110101 011101111 1101111 10001010001 0100110011 1 1111010101 110110011 1011111 1101010011 0101011111 10010011101 0101000111 11001001 1 0111111101 111101001 1111001101 0111001101 0101011 1110011011 0100010101 01011100101 1 01010101001 11001101001 1001010101 111110101 11011100111 01110010111 100100011 1011110100 1 101001110 1101010101 10110100010 110101101 0100101010 1101000101 011001101 10011101111 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,622 |
Words | 296 |
Sentences | 12 |
Stanzas | 5 |
Stanza Lengths | 9, 9, 9, 9, 9 |
Lines Amount | 45 |
Letters per line (avg) | 29 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 261 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 59 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on April 28, 2023
- 1:29 min read
- 209 Views
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"On The Medusa Of Leonardo da Vinci In The Florentine Gallery" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 14 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/29189/on-the-medusa-of-leonardo-da-vinci-in-the-florentine-gallery>.
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