Analysis of The Dragon and the Undying

Siegfried Sassoon 1886 (Matfield) – 1967 (Heytesbury)



All night the flares go up; the Dragon sings
And beats upon the dark with furious wings;
And, stung to rage by his own darting fires,
Reaches with grappling coils from town to town;
He lusts to break the loveliness of spires,
And hurls their martyred music toppling down.
Yet, though the slain are homeless as the breeze,

Vocal are they, like storm-bewilder'd seas.
Their faces are the fair, unshrouded night,
And planets are their eyes, their ageless dreams.
Tenderly stooping earthward from their height,
They wander in the dusk with chanting streams,
And they are dawn-lit trees, with arms up-flung,
To hail the burning heavens they left unsung.


Scheme AAXBXBC CDEDEFF
Poetic Form
Metre 1101110101 01010111001 01111111010 1011011111 11110111 01110101001 1101110101 1011110101 11010111 0101111101 100101111 1100011101 0111111111 11010101101
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 656
Words 111
Sentences 5
Stanzas 2
Stanza Lengths 7, 7
Lines Amount 14
Letters per line (avg) 37
Words per line (avg) 8
Letters per stanza (avg) 258
Words per stanza (avg) 55
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 09, 2023

33 sec read
93

Siegfried Sassoon

Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, CBE, MC was an eminent English poet, writer, and soldier. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the leading poets of the First World War. His poetry both described the horrors of the trenches, and satirised the patriotic pretensions of those who, in Sassoon's view, were responsible for a jingoism-fuelled war. He later won acclaim for his prose work, notably his three-volume fictionalised autobiography, collectively known as the "Sherston trilogy". more…

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