Analysis of Justice Denied In Massachusetts

Edna St. Vincent Millay 1892 (Rockland) – 1950 (Austerlitz)



Let us abandon then our gardens and go home
And sit in the sitting-room
Shall the larkspur blossom or the corn grow under this cloud?
Sour to the fruitful seed
Is the cold earth under this cloud,
Fostering quack and weed, we have marched upon but cannot
conquer;
We have bent the blades of our hoes against the stalks of them.

Let us go home, and sit in the sitting room.
Not in our day
Shall the cloud go over and the sun rise as before,
Beneficent upon us
Out of the glittering bay,
And the warm winds be blown inward from the sea
Moving the blades of corn
With a peaceful sound.

Forlorn, forlorn,
Stands the blue hay-rack by the empty mow.
And the petals drop to the ground,
Leaving the tree unfruited.
The sun that warmed our stooping backs and withered the weed
uprooted—
We shall not feel it again.
We shall die in darkness, and be buried in the rain.

What from the splendid dead
We have inherited —
Furrows sweet to the grain, and the weed subdued —
See now the slug and the mildew plunder.
Evil does overwhelm
The larkspur and the corn;
We have seen them go under.

Let us sit here, sit still,
Here in the sitting-room until we die;
At the step of Death on the walk, rise and go;
Leaving to our children's children the beautiful doorway,
And this elm,
And a blighted earth to till
With a broken hoe.


Scheme XABCBXDX AEXXEXFG FHGBCIXX XIXDJFD KXHEJKH
Poetic Form
Metre 1101011010011 0100101 1011010111011 1010101 10111011 10010111101110 10 111011101010111 11110100101 10101 1011100011101 010011 1101001 00111110101 100111 10101 0101 1011110101 00101101 10011 01111010101001 010 1111101 1110100110001 110101 110100 1110100101 110100110 10101 01001 1111110 111111 1001010111 10111101101 10110101001001 011 0010111 10101
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 1,283
Words 251
Sentences 12
Stanzas 5
Stanza Lengths 8, 8, 8, 7, 7
Lines Amount 38
Letters per line (avg) 27
Words per line (avg) 7
Letters per stanza (avg) 204
Words per stanza (avg) 50
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 27, 2023

1:15 min read
338

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay was an American poet and playwright. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, the third woman to win the award for poetry, and was also known for her feminist activism more…

All Edna St. Vincent Millay poems | Edna St. Vincent Millay Books

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