Analysis of For Osip Mandelstam
Anna Akhmatova 1889 (Odessa) – 1966 (Moscow)
And the town is frozen solid in a vice,
Trees, walls, snow, beneath a glass.
Over crystal, on slippery tracks of ice,
the painted sleighs and I, together, pass.
And over St Peter’s there are poplars, crows
there’s a pale green dome there that glows,
dim in the sun-shrouded dust.
The field of heroes lingers in my thought,
Kulikovo’s barbarian battleground.
The frozen poplars, like glasses for a toast,
clash now, more noisily, overhead.
As though it was our wedding, and the crowd
were drinking to our health and happiness.
But Fear and the Muse take turns to guard
the room where the exiled poet is banished,
and the night, marching at full pace,
of the coming dawn, has no knowledge.
Scheme | ABABCCDEFGHIJKLMN |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 00111010001 1110101 10101100111 0101010101 0101101111 10111111 1001101 0111010011 1010010 0101110101 111100101 11111010001 01011010100 110011111 0110110110 00110111 101011110 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 685 |
Words | 123 |
Sentences | 8 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 17 |
Lines Amount | 17 |
Letters per line (avg) | 32 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 536 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 121 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 36 sec read
- 118 Views
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"For Osip Mandelstam" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 28 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/2986/for-osip-mandelstam>.
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