Analysis of The Sick Muse
Charles Baudelaire 1821 (Paris) – 1867 (Paris)
My impoverished muse, alas! What have you for me this morning?
Your empty eyes are stocked with nocturnal visions,
In your cheek's cold and taciturn reflection,
I see insanity and horror forming.
The green succubus and the red urchin,
Have they poured you fear and love from their urns?
The nightmare of a mutinous fist that despotically turns,
Does it drown you at the bottom of a loch beyond searching?
I wish that your breast exhaled the scent of sanity,
That your womb of thought was not a tomb more frequently
And that your Christian blood flowed around a buoy that was rhythmical,
Like the numberless sounds of antique syllables,
Where reigns in turn the father of songs,
Phoebus, and the great Pan, the harvest sovereign.
Translated by William A. Sigler
Submitted by Ryan McGuire
Scheme | ABCACBXA DDX XXC X X |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 101010111111110 110111101010 0111010010 11010001010 01100110 1111101111 01101001111 111110101010110 1111101011100 1111111011100 011101101010111 1011101100 110101011 10001101010 0101100100 01011001 |
Closest metre | Iambic hexameter |
Characters | 792 |
Words | 137 |
Sentences | 8 |
Stanzas | 5 |
Stanza Lengths | 8, 3, 3, 1, 1 |
Lines Amount | 16 |
Letters per line (avg) | 40 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 127 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 27 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on April 20, 2023
- 41 sec read
- 114 Views
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