Analysis of The Changeling
Toll no bell for me, dear Father dear Mother,
Waste no sighs;
There are my sisters, there is my little brother
Who plays in the place called Paradise,
Your children all, your children for ever;
But I, so wild,
Your disgrace, with the queer brown face, was never,
Never, I know, but half your child!
In the garden at play, all day, last summer,
Far and away I heard
The sweet "tweet-tweet" of a strange new-comer,
The dearest, clearest call of a bird.
It lived down there in the deep green hollow,
My own old home, and the fairies say
The word of a bird is a thing to follow,
So I was away a night and a day.
One evening, too, by the nursery fire,
We snuggled close and sat roudn so still,
When suddenly as the wind blew higher,
Something scratched on the window-sill,
A pinched brown face peered in--I shivered;
No one listened or seemed to see;
The arms of it waved and the wings of it quivered,
Whoo--I knew it had come for me!
Some are as bad as bad can be!
All night long they danced in the rain,
Round and round in a dripping chain,
Threw their caps at the window-pane,
Tried to make me scream and shout
And fling the bedclothes all about:
I meant to stay in bed that night,
And if only you had left a light
They would never have got me out!
Sometimes I wouldn't speak, you see,
Or answer when you spoke to me,
Because in the long, still dusks of Spring
You can hear the whole world whispering;
The shy green grasses making love,
The feathers grow on the dear grey dove,
The tiny heart of the redstart beat,
The patter of the squirrel's feet,
The pebbles pushing in the silver streams,
The rushes talking in their dreams,
The swish-swish of the bat's black wings,
The wild-wood bluebell's sweet ting-tings,
Humming and hammering at your ear,
Everything there is to hear
In the heart of hidden things.
But not in the midst of the nursery riot,
That's why I wanted to be quiet,
Couldn't do my sums, or sing,
Or settle down to anything.
And when, for that, I was sent upstairs
I did kneel down to say my prayers;
But the King who sits on your high church steeple
Has nothing to do with us fairy people!
'Times I pleased you, dear Father, dear Mother,
Learned all my lessons and liked to play,
And dearly I loved the little pale brother
Whom some other bird must have called away.
Why did they bring me here to make me
Not quite bad and not quite good,
Why, unless They're wicked, do They want, in spite,
to take me
Back to Their wet, wild wood?
Now, every nithing I shall see the windows shining,
The gold lamp's glow, and the fire's red gleam,
While the best of us are twining twigs and the rest of us
are whining
In the hollow by the stream.
Black and chill are Their nights on the wold;
And They live so long and They feel no pain:
I shall grow up, but never grow old,
I shall always, always be very cold,
I shall never come back again!
Scheme | ABAXACAC ADADEFEF AGAGDHCHHIIIJJKKJ HHLLMMNNOOPBQQPRRLLSSTT AFAFHUKHULVXLVWIWWX |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Tetractys (20%) |
Metre | 11111110110 111 111101111010 11001110 1101110110 1111 10110111110 10111111 00101111110 100111 0111101110 010101101 1111001110 111100101 01101101110 1110101001 11011010010 11101111 1100101110 10110101 011110110 11101111 01111001111 11111111 11111111 11111001 10100101 11110101 1111101 0101101 11110111 011011101 11101111 01110111 11011111 010011111 111011100 01110101 010110111 01011011 0101011 0101000101 01010011 01110111 0111111 100100111 101111 0011101 110011010010 111101110 1011111 1101110 011111101 11111111 10111111110 11011111010 1111110110 111100111 01011010110 1110111101 111111111 1110111 10111011101 111 111111 1100111101010 0111001011 10111110100111 110 0010101 101111101 0111101111 111111011 11111101 11101101 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 2,784 |
Words | 548 |
Sentences | 14 |
Stanzas | 5 |
Stanza Lengths | 8, 8, 17, 23, 19 |
Lines Amount | 75 |
Letters per line (avg) | 29 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 437 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 109 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on April 24, 2023
- 2:47 min read
- 219 Views
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"The Changeling" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 28 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/5555/the-changeling>.
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