Analysis of A Brown Study
Edith Nesbit 1858 (Kennington, Surrey ) – 1924 (New Romney, Kent)
LET them sing of their primrose and cowslip,
Their daffodil-gold-coloured hair,
Their bluebells, blue eyes, and white violets,
All the pale dreamy things they find fair;
Give me stir of brown leaves in the sunshine,
The whir of brown wings through the wheat,
The rush of brown hares through the clover,
And the light in brown eyes of my sweet!
Gold hair? Well, I never could love it,
Yet gold, I suppose, has its worth;
The head that I love is as dusky
As the breast of our mother, the earth;
With a gleam like the shine of wet seaweed,
Round pools that the tide has left clear,
And warm like the breast of a linnet,
And as brown, is the hair of my dear.
From the edge of the cliff we look downwards
On the shore, and the bay, and the town,
And brown is the short turf we lean on,
The fishing-boats' sails are all brown:
The sky may be blue--that's the background,--
But the picture itself, to be fair,
However it's shaded and varied,
Should be brown as the dress that you wear.
A lark bursts to sudden sweet singing--
That tuft of brown grass is his home--
And now, a brown speck, he is rising
Against the clear windy sky-dome;
And he sings--how I know? Love instructs me
To know all his notes, what they mean--
That it isn't the colour I care for,
But yourself, oh, my gipsy, my queen!
Ah! the lark knows my heart--I his language;
It's my heart he sings out to the skies;
It is you that I love, and what matter
The colour of hair or of eyes?
No doubt I should love you as dearly
Were your hair like an apricot's down,
And your eyes like the grey of the morning;
But I'm glad, all the same, that they're brown.
Scheme | XAXAXBCB DEFEGHDH XIXIXAGA FJFJKLXL XMCMKIFI |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Etheree (25%) Tetractys (20%) |
Metre | 111111010 1101101 111101100 101101111 111111001 01111101 011111010 001011111 111110111 11101111 01111111 1011101001 101101111 11101111 011011010 011101111 1011011110 101001001 011011111 01011111 01111101 101001111 10110010 111101111 011110110 11111111 010111110 01011011 0111111011 11111111 111001111 10111111 1011111110 111111101 1111110110 0111111 111111110 0111111 0111011010 111101111 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,619 |
Words | 314 |
Sentences | 10 |
Stanzas | 5 |
Stanza Lengths | 8, 8, 8, 8, 8 |
Lines Amount | 40 |
Letters per line (avg) | 31 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 244 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 62 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:36 min read
- 147 Views
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"A Brown Study" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 16 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/8753/a-brown-study>.
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