Analysis of New Year's Eve, 1913
Gordon Bottomley 1874 (Keighley) – 1948
O, Cartmel bells ring soft to-night,
And Cartmel bells ring clear,
But I lie far away to-night,
Listening with my dear;
Listening in a frosty land
Where all the bells are still
And the small-windowed bell-towers stand
Dark under heath and hill.
I thought that, with each dying year,
As long as life should last
The bells of Cartmel I should hear
Ring out an aged past:
The plunging, mingling sounds increase
Darkness's depth and height,
The hollow valley gains more peace
And ancientness to-night:
The loveliness, the fruitfulness,
The power of life lived there
Return, revive, more closely press
Upon that midnight air.
But many deaths have place in men
Before they come to die;
Joys must be used and spent, and then
Abandoned and passed by.
Earth is not ours; no cherished space
Can hold us from life's flow,
That bears us thither and thence by ways
We knew not we should go.
O, Cartmel bells ring loud, ring clear,
Through midnight deep and hoar,
A year new-born, and I shall hear
The Cartmel bells no more.
Scheme | ABAB CDCD BEFE GAGA GHXH IJIJ XKXK BLFL |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Quatrain |
Metre | 1111111 01111 11110111 100111 10000101 110111 001101101 110101 11111101 111111 0111111 11111 010100101 1101 01010111 0111 0101 0101111 01011101 01111 11011101 011111 11110101 010011 111101101 111111 11110111 111111 1111111 11101 01110111 01111 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,002 |
Words | 186 |
Sentences | 6 |
Stanzas | 8 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4 |
Lines Amount | 32 |
Letters per line (avg) | 25 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 99 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 22 |
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Submitted on August 03, 2020
Modified on April 13, 2023
- 56 sec read
- 15 Views
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"New Year's Eve, 1913" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 21 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/55459/new-year%27s-eve%2C-1913>.
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