Analysis of A Man Doesn't Have Time In His Life
Yehuda Amichai 1924 (Würzburg) – 2000 (Israel)
A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.
A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.
A man doesn't have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.
And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.
He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there's time for everything.
Scheme | XAXBX XBXXCXXX XBBC XXXBABB XXXBA |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 011011011 111110 1101100111 0101100101 11011 0111101110110 11011011 101111101101 111010101 0110010010001 101001110101 1100 110111 011011 111011111 101110111111 101101 01111011 1100100 1011001010 110110110 11010101 1010110 011 111111010 100110101 01101101 011010101 111110 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 989 |
Words | 194 |
Sentences | 11 |
Stanzas | 5 |
Stanza Lengths | 5, 8, 4, 7, 5 |
Lines Amount | 29 |
Letters per line (avg) | 27 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 159 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 39 |
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