Analysis of The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm
Wallace Stevens 1879 (Reading) – 1955 (Hartford)
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
Scheme | Ax bA bc dx xd xc xe ex |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 0111000111 01001010101 1101010101 0111000111 01010111111 01101010101 101110111 01011111111 010111001011 01110011111 0101110101101 011010101 00111010011 01111101001 11011100101 10101010101 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 707 |
Words | 142 |
Sentences | 9 |
Stanzas | 8 |
Stanza Lengths | 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2 |
Lines Amount | 16 |
Letters per line (avg) | 35 |
Words per line (avg) | 9 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 70 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 18 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on April 23, 2023
- 42 sec read
- 106 Views
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