Analysis of The Snow Storm

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



No hawk hangs over in this air:
The urgent snow is everywhere.
The wing adroiter than a sail
Must lean away from such a gale,
Abandoning its straight intent,
Or else expose tough ligament
And tender flesh to what before
Meant dampened feathers, nothing more.
Forceless upon our backs there fall
Infrequent flakes hexagonal,
Devised in many a curious style
To charm our safety for a while,
Where close to earth like mice we go
Under the horizontal snow.


Scheme AABBCDEEFGHHII
Poetic Form
Metre 11110011 0101110 011101 11011101 01001101 11011100 01011101 11010101 10110111 01010100 0101001001 111010101 11111111 1000101
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 447
Words 81
Sentences 4
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 14
Lines Amount 14
Letters per line (avg) 26
Words per line (avg) 6
Letters per stanza (avg) 365
Words per stanza (avg) 79
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 14, 2023

24 sec read
590

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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