Analysis of The House Of Dust: Part 02: 09: Interlude
Conrad Potter Aiken 1889 (Savannah, Georgia) – 1973 (Savannah, Georgia)
The days, the nights, flow one by one above us,
The hours go silently over our lifted faces,
We are like dreamers who walk beneath a sea.
Beneath high walls we flow in the sun together.
We sleep, we wake, we laugh, we pursue, we flee.
We sit at tables and sip our morning coffee,
We read the papers for tales of lust or crime.
The door swings shut behind the latest comer.
We set our watches, regard the time.
What have we done? I close my eyes, remember
The great machine whose sinister brain before me
Smote and smote with a rhythmic beat.
My hands have torn down walls, the stone and plaster.
I dropped great beams to the dusty street.
My eyes are worn with measuring cloths of purple,
And golden cloths, and wavering cloths, and pale.
I dream of a crowd of faces, white with menace.
Hands reach up to tear me. My brain will fail.
Here, where the walls go down beneath our picks,
These walls whose windows gap against the sky,
Atom by atom of flesh and brain and marble
Will build a glittering tower before we die . . .
The young boy whistles, hurrying down the street,
The young girl hums beneath her breath.
One goes out to beauty, and does not know it.
And one goes out to death.
Scheme | AXBCB BDCD CBECE FGAG XHFH EIXI |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 01011111011 010110010101010 11110110101 011111001010 11111110111 1111001101010 11010111111 01110101010 1110100101 11111111010 010111001011 10110101 11111101010 111110101 111111001110 01010100101 111011101110 1111111111 11011101101 1111010101 101101101010 110100100111 01110100101 01110101 11111001111 011111 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,195 |
Words | 226 |
Sentences | 21 |
Stanzas | 6 |
Stanza Lengths | 5, 4, 5, 4, 4, 4 |
Lines Amount | 26 |
Letters per line (avg) | 35 |
Words per line (avg) | 9 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 153 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 38 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:07 min read
- 36 Views
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"The House Of Dust: Part 02: 09: Interlude" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 30 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/7063/the-house-of-dust%3A-part-02%3A-09%3A-interlude>.
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