Analysis of Meeting Among the Mountains
David Herbert Lawrence 1885 (Eastwood, Nottinghamshire) – 1930 (Vence)
The little pansies by the road have turned
Away their purple faces and their gold,
And evening has taken all the bees from the thyme,
And all the scent is shed away by the cold.
Against the hard and pale blue evening sky
The mountain's new-dropped summer snow is clear
Glistening in steadfast stillness: like transcendent
Clean pain sending on us a chill down here.
Chirst on the Cross! -- his beautiful young man's body
Has fallen dead upon the nails, and hangs
White and loose at last, with all the pain
Drawn on his mouth, eyes broken at last by his pangs.
And slowly down the mountain road, belated,
A bullock wagon comes; so I am ashamed
To gaze any more at the Christ, whom the mountain snows
Whitely confront; I wait on the grass, am lamed.
The breath of the bullock stains the hard, chill air,
The band is across its brow, and it scarcely seems
To draw the load, so still and slow it moves,
While the driver on the shaft sits crouched in dreams.
Surely about his sunburnt face is something
That vexes me with wonder. He sits so still
Here among all this silence, crouching forward,
Dreaming and letting the bullock take its will.
I stand aside on the grass to let them go;
-- And Christ, I have met his accusing eyes again,
The brown eyes black with misery and hate, that look
Full in my own, and the torment starts again.
One moment the hate leaps at me standing there,
One moment I see the stillness of agony,
Something frozen in the silence that dare not be
Loosed, one moment the darkness frightens me.
Then among the averted pansies, beneath the high
White peaks of snow, at the foot of the sunken Christ
I stand in a chill of anguish, trying to say
The joy I bought was not too highly priced.
But he has gone, motionless, hating me,
Living as the mountains do, because they are strong,
With a pale, dead Christ on the crucifix of his heart,
And breathing the frozen memory of his wrong.
Still in his nostrils the frozen breath of despair,
And heart like a cross that bears dead agony
Of naked love, clenched in his fists the shame,
And in his belly the smouldering hate of me.
And I, as I stand in the cold, averted flowers,
Feel the shame-wounds in his hands pierce through my own,
And breathe despair that turns my lungs to stone
And know the dead Christ weighing on my bone.
Scheme | ABXB CXXX DEXE XXXA FGXG XHXH XIXI FDDD CJXJ DKXK FDXD XLLL |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Quatrain (67%) |
Metre | 0101010111 0111010011 010110101101 01011101101 0101011101 0101110111 10001101010 1110110111 110111001110 1101010101 101111101 111111011111 01010101010 01010111101 1110110110101 10011110111 01101010111 011011101101 1101110111 10101011101 1001111110 1111101111 10111101010 10010010111 11011011111 011111010101 011111000111 1011001101 11001111101 110110101100 101000101111 1110010101 1010010100101 111110110101 110011101011 0111111101 1111100101 101010101111 101111010111 010010100111 101100101101 01101111100 1101101101 0011001111 0111100101010 10110111111 0101111111 0101110111 |
Closest metre | Iambic hexameter |
Characters | 2,299 |
Words | 430 |
Sentences | 15 |
Stanzas | 12 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4 |
Lines Amount | 48 |
Letters per line (avg) | 37 |
Words per line (avg) | 9 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 150 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 36 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 2:09 min read
- 108 Views
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