Analysis of The First Spring Day
Augusta Davies Webster 1837 (Poole, Dorset) – 1894
THE sunshine died long ago,
Stifled out long ago,
And the waste of the world was grey,
And night was the best to know,
For night was to doze and forget the day,
To be warm and forgetting and still,
And need not the sun and know not the chill:
But oh, for the day that was darkened so!
Why gaze on a barren heaven,
Void and unchanging heaven,
On a barren earth in the grime,
And not a poor blossom given,
No thing that was thinking of sunshine time,
For a promise, a praise of the past?
And so one forgot the sunshine at last;
And sleep could avail, but what to have striven?
The sunshine wakes once anew,
Wakes and is born anew,
And the Age of the earth grows young,
And heaven has its youth for hue,
And hope is the tune of the spring-bird's tongue,
And the leaves in their prisons all hark,
And blossoms will know there is end of the dark:
One hour of the sun, and the spring-time grew!
The sunshine new on the earth,
Heaven to brighten the earth,
And the deathful dimness gone by,
The barren and winter dearth!
And to-day is the best till the next is nigh,
And to-night is to-morrow begun,
To-morrow, when blossoms remember the sun!
Dead hopes, are ye born with the blossoms birth?
Scheme | AABABCCA DDEDEFFD GGHGHIIG JJKJKDDJ |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 011101 101101 00110111 0110111 1111100101 111001001 0110101101 1110111101 11101010 1001010 10101001 01011010 111110111 101001101 011010111 01101111110 011101 101101 00110111 01011111 0110110111 001011011 01011111101 11010100111 011101 1011001 001111 0100101 01110110111 011111001 11011001001 1111110101 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,161 |
Words | 230 |
Sentences | 8 |
Stanzas | 4 |
Stanza Lengths | 8, 8, 8, 8 |
Lines Amount | 32 |
Letters per line (avg) | 29 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 228 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 57 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:09 min read
- 77 Views
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"The First Spring Day" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 8 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/4115/the-first-spring-day>.
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