Analysis of Night on the Convoy
Siegfried Sassoon 1886 (Matfield) – 1967 (Heytesbury)
Out in the blustering darkness, on the deck
A gleam of stars looks down. Long blurs of black,
The lean Destroyers, level with our track,
Plunging and stealing, watch the perilous way
Through backward racing seas and caverns of chill spray.
One sentry by the davits, in the gloom
Stands mute: the boat heaves onward through the night.
Shrouded is every chink of cabined light:
And sluiced by floundering waves that hiss and boom
And crash like guns, the troop-ship shudders ... doom.
Now something at my feet stirs with a sigh;
And slowly growing used to groping dark,
I know that the hurricane-deck, down all its length,
Is heaped and spread with lads in sprawling strength—
Blanketed soldiers sleeping. In the stark
Danger of life at war, they lie so still,
All prostrate and defenceless, head by head...
And I remember Arras, and that hill
Where dumb with pain I stumbled among the dead.
We are going home. The troop-ship, in a thrill
Of fiery-chamber’d anguish, throbs and rolls.
We are going home ... victims ... three thousand souls.
Scheme | XAABBCDDCC XEFFEGHGH GII |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 10010010101 0111111111 01010101101 10010101001 110101010111 110101001 1101110101 1011001111 01110011101 0111011101 1101111101 0101011101 11101011111 1101110101 1001010001 1011111111 11001111 010101011 11111100101 11101011001 1100110101 11101101101 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,081 |
Words | 182 |
Sentences | 15 |
Stanzas | 3 |
Stanza Lengths | 10, 9, 3 |
Lines Amount | 22 |
Letters per line (avg) | 37 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 271 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 60 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 54 sec read
- 82 Views
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