Analysis of Man And Wife
Robert Lowell 1917 (Boston) – 1977 (New York City)
Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother's bed;
the rising sun in war paint dyes us red;
in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine,
abandoned, almost Dionysian.
At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street,
blossoms on our magnolia ignite
the morning with their murderous five days' white.
All night I've held your hand,
as if you had
a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad,
its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye,
and dragged me home alive.... Oh my Petite,
clearest of all God's creatures, still all air and nerve:
you were in our twenties, and I,
once hand on glass
and heart in mouth,
out drank the Rahvs in the heat
of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet,
too boiled and shy
and poker-faced to make a pass,
while the shrill verve
of your invective scorched the traditional South.
Now twelve years later, you turn your back.
Sleepless, you hold
your pillow to your hollows like a child;
your old-fashioned tirade,
loving, rapid, merciless,
breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.
| Scheme | AAXXBCCXDDEBFEGHBBEGFH XXXXXA |
|---|---|
| Poetic Form | |
| Metre | 111111101 0101011111 011010111 01010100 11011111001 1011001001 01011100111 111111 1111 0111010101 110110101 0111011101 101111011101 100101001 1111 0101 1101001 1101010111 1101 01011101 1011 110101001001 111101111 1011 1101110101 111001 1010100 11001010111 |
| Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
| Characters | 974 |
| Words | 176 |
| Sentences | 6 |
| Stanzas | 2 |
| Stanza Lengths | 22, 6 |
| Lines Amount | 28 |
| Letters per line (avg) | 28 |
| Words per line (avg) | 6 |
| Letters per stanza (avg) | 391 |
| Words per stanza (avg) | 88 |
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Submitted on August 03, 2020
Modified on May 02, 2023
- 53 sec read
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"Man And Wife" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 28 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/56522/man-and-wife>.
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