Analysis of To Flowers From Italy in Winter

Thomas Hardy 1840 (Stinsford) – 1928 (Dorchester, Dorset)



Sunned in the South, and here to-day;
   --If all organic things
Be sentient, Flowers, as some men say,
   What are your ponderings?

How can you stay, nor vanish quite
   From this bleak spot of thorn,
And birch, and fir, and frozen white
   Expanse of the forlorn?

Frail luckless exiles hither brought!
   Your dust will not regain
Old sunny haunts of Classic thought
   When you shall waste and wane;

But mix with alien earth, be lit
   With frigid Boreal flame,
And not a sign remain in it
   To tell men whence you came.


Scheme ABAB CDCD EFEF GHGH
Poetic Form Traditional rhyme
Quatrain 
Metre 10010111 110101 11101111 1111 11111101 111111 01010101 011001 1101101 111101 11011101 111101 111100111 11011 01010101 111111
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 532
Words 94
Sentences 5
Stanzas 4
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4, 4
Lines Amount 16
Letters per line (avg) 24
Words per line (avg) 6
Letters per stanza (avg) 98
Words per stanza (avg) 23
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 06, 2023

28 sec read
157

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy, was not a Scottish Minister, not a Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland nor a Professor of Eccesiastical History at Edinburgh University. more…

All Thomas Hardy poems | Thomas Hardy Books

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