Analysis of The Empty House
Walter de la Mare 1873 (Charlton, London) – 1956 (Twickenham)
See this house, how dark it is
Beneath its vast-boughed trees!
Not one trembling leaflet cries
To that Watcher in the skies—
‘Remove, remove thy searching gaze,
Innocent of heaven’s ways,
Brood not, Moon, so wildly bright,
On secrets hidden from sight.’
‘Secrets,’ sighs the night-wind,
‘Vacancy is all I find;
Every keyhole I have made
Wails a summons, faint and sad,
No voice ever answers me,
Only vacancy.’
‘Once, once … ’ the cricket shrills,
And far and near the quiet fills
With its tiny voice, and then
Hush falls again.
Mute shadows creeping slow
Mark how the hours go.
Every stone is mouldering slow.
And the least winds that blow
Some minutest atom shake,
Some fretting ruin make
In roof and walls. How black it is
Beneath these thick boughed trees!
Scheme | ABCCDDEE FFXXGGAXHH IIIIJJAB |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 1111111 011111 11100101 1110001 01011101 1001101 1111101 1101011 101011 1001111 1001111 1010101 1110101 10100 110101 01010101 1110101 1101 11101 110101 1001111 001111 11101 110101 01011111 011111 |
Closest metre | Iambic trimeter |
Characters | 789 |
Words | 138 |
Sentences | 9 |
Stanzas | 3 |
Stanza Lengths | 8, 10, 8 |
Lines Amount | 26 |
Letters per line (avg) | 23 |
Words per line (avg) | 5 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 196 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 44 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on April 16, 2023
- 41 sec read
- 194 Views
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"The Empty House" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 29 Mar. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/38311/the-empty-house>.
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