Analysis of From early dawn the thirtieth of April...
Boris Pasternak 1890 (Moscow) – 1960 (Peredelkino)
From early dawn the thirtieth of April
Is given up to children of the town,
And caught in trying on the festive necklace,
By dusk it only just is settling down.
Like heaps of squashy berries under muslin
The town emerges out of crimson gauze.
Along the streets the boulevards are dragging
Their twilight with them, like a rank of dwarves.
The evening world is always eve and blossom,
But this one with a sprouting of its own
From May-day anniversaries will flower
One day into a commune fully blown.
For long it will remain a day of shifting,
Pre-festive cleaning, fanciful decor,
As once it used to be with Whitsun birches
Or pan-Athenian fires long before.
Just so they will go on, conveying actors
To their assembly points; beat sand; just so
Pull up towards illuminated ledges
The plywood boards, the crimson calico.
Just so in threes the sailors briskly walking
Will skirt the grass in gardens and in parks,
The moon at nightfall sink into the pavements
Like a dead city or a burnt-out hearth.
But with each year more splendid and more spreading
The taut beginning of the rose will bloom,
More clearly grow in health and sense of honour,
Sincerity more visibly will loom.
The living folksongs, customs and traditions
Will ever spreading, many-petalled lay
Their scent on fields and industries and meadows
From early buddings on the first of May,
Until the full fermented risen spirit
Of ripened years will shoot up, like the smell
Of humid centifolia. It will have to
Reveal itself, it cannot help but tell.
Scheme | XABA XXCX XDED CFBF XGXG CXXX CHEH XIXI XJXJ |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Quatrain (78%) |
Metre | 11010100110 1101110101 01010101010 11110111001 11110101010 0101011101 0101010110 111110111 0101111010 1111010111 1110100110 1101010101 11110101110 1101010001 111111111 11010010101 11111101010 1101011111 1101010010 01101010 11010101010 1101010001 0111101010 1011010111 11111100110 0101010111 1101010111 0100110011 0101100010 110101011 1111010001 110110111 01010101010 1101111101 11011111 0101110111 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,485 |
Words | 266 |
Sentences | 11 |
Stanzas | 9 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4 |
Lines Amount | 36 |
Letters per line (avg) | 34 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 135 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 29 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on April 14, 2023
- 1:19 min read
- 123 Views
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"From early dawn the thirtieth of April..." Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 13 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/4488/from-early-dawn-the-thirtieth-of-april...>.
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