Analysis of Iva
The old ones told stories, snapping beans.
My grandmother's hands with nails like moons.
We shuddered the flies, and our skins drank in the summer,
and I saw her a child in the West Virginia mountains.
And the locusts, who were sometimes crazy, sang
so that if you listened to them on purpose,
it became the deafening buzz of high tension wires.
That day was whole and ripe.
That day was sweet, like the shoepeg corn she would put up. Later.
Her silver cans of snuff were magic, the almanac cryptic.
Her mojo hanging around her like musk.
A witch, but no witch,
just hillbilly, just indian,
like I am witch and no witch.
And she said it was a-gonna rain and she would be right,
and what I remember most would be her perfect hands,
my father's hands,
and the taste of butter.
Scheme | ABCDEFGHCIJKLKMNNC |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 011110101 11011111 11001010110010 01100100101010 00101001101 11111011110 10101001111010 111101 11111011111110 01011101001010 0101001011 01111 11001100 1111011 01111010101111 0110101110011 1101 001110 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 757 |
Words | 144 |
Sentences | 11 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 18 |
Lines Amount | 18 |
Letters per line (avg) | 33 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 602 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 144 |
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Submitted on May 02, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 43 sec read
- 2 Views
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"Iva" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 28 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/75804/iva>.
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