Analysis of The Man Against the Sky
Between me and the sunset, like a dome
Against the glory of a world on fire,
Now burned a sudden hill,
Bleak, round, and high, by flame-lit height made higher,
With nothing on it for the flame to kill
Save one who moved and was alone up there
To loom before the chaos and the glare
As if he were the last god going home
Unto his last desire.
Dark, marvelous, and inscrutable he moved on
Till down the fiery distance he was gone,
Like one of those eternal, remote things
That range across a man’s imaginings
When a sure music fills him and he knows
What he may say thereafter to few men,—
The touch of ages having wrought
An echo and a glimpse of what he thought
A phantom or a legend until then;
For whether lighted over ways that save,
Or lured from all repose,
If he go on too far to find a grave,
Mostly alone he goes.
Even he, who stood where I had found him,
On high with fire all round him,
Who moved along the molten west,
And over the round hill’s crest
That seemed half ready with him to go down,
Flame-bitten and flame-cleft,
As if there were to be no last thing left
Of a nameless unimaginable town,—
Even he who climbed and vanished may have taken
Down to the perils of a depth not known,
From death defended though by men forsaken,
The bread that every man must eat alone;
He may have walked while others hardly dared
Look on to see him stand where many fell;
And upward out of that, as out of hell,
He may have sung and striven
To mount where more of him shall yet be given,
Bereft of all retreat,
To sevenfold heat,—
As on a day when three in Dura shared
The furnace, and were spared
For glory by that king of Babylon
Who made himself so great that God, who heard,
Covered him with long feathers, like a bird.
Again, he may have gone down easily,
By comfortable altitudes, and found,
As always, underneath him solid ground
Whereon to be sufficient and to stand
Possessed already of the promised land,
Far stretched and fair to see:
A good sight, verily,
And one to make the eyes of her who bore him
Shine glad with hidden tears.
Why question of his ease of who before him,
In one place or another where they left
Their names as far behind them as their bones,
And yet by dint of slaughter toil and theft,
And shrewdly sharpened stones,
Carved hard the way for his ascendency
Through deserts of lost years?
Why trouble him now who sees and hears
No more than what his innocence requires,
And therefore to no other height aspires
Than one at which he neither quails nor tires?
He may do more by seeing what he sees
Than others eager for iniquities;
He may, by seeing all things for the best,
Incite futurity to do the rest.
Or with an even likelihood,
He may have met with atrabilious eyes
The fires of time on equal terms and passed
Indifferently down, until at last
His only kind of grandeur would have been,
Apparently, in being seen.
He may have had for evil or for good
No argument; he may have had no care
For what without himself went anywhere
To failure or to glory, and least of all
For such a stale, flamboyant miracle;
He may have been the prophet of an art
Immovable to old idolatries;
He may have been a player without a part,
Annoyed that even the sun should have the skies
For such a flaming way to advertise;
He may have been a painter sick at heart
With Nature’s toiling for a new surprise;
He may have been a cynic, who now, for all
Of anything divine that his effete
Negation may have tasted,
Saw truth in his own image, rather small,
Forbore to fever the ephemeral,
Found any barren height a good retreat
From any swarming street,
And in the sun saw power superbly wasted;
And when the primitive old-fashioned stars
Came out again to shine on joys and wars
More primitive, and all arrayed for doom,
He may have proved a world a sorry thing
In his imagining,
And life a lighted highway to the tomb.
Or, mounting with infirm unsearching tread,
His hopes to chaos led,
He may have stumbled up there from the past,
And with an aching strangeness viewed the last
Abysmal conflagration of his dreams,—
A flame where nothing seems
To burn but flame itself, by nothing fed;
And while it all went out,
Not even the faint anodyne of doubt
May then have eased a painful going down
From pictured heights of power and lost renown,
Revealed at length to his outlived endeavor
Remote and
Scheme | Text too long |
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Poetic Form | |
Metre | 011001101 01010101110 110101 11011111110 1101110111 1111010111 1101010001 1110011101 1011010 110000100111 11010010111 1111010011 1101011 1011011011 1111010111 01110101 1100011111 0101010011 1101010111 111101 1111111101 100111 1011111111 11110111 11010101 0100111 1111011111 110011 1110111111 1010010001 101110101110 1101010111 11010111010 01110011101 1111110101 1111111101 0101111111 1111010 11111111110 011101 1101 1101110101 010001 110111110 1101111111 1011110101 0111111100 110001001 11011101 111010011 0101010101 110111 0111 01110110111 111101 11011111011 0111010111 1111011111 0111110101 010101 1101110100 110111 110111101 11111100010 0111101010 11111101110 1111110111 1101011 1111011101 0111101 1111010 1111111 01011110101 110111 1101101111 01000101 1111110111 1100111111 110101110 11011100111 1101010100 1111010111 0100111 11110100101 01110011101 110101110 1111010111 1101010101 11110101111 110011101 0101110 1101110101 111000100 1101010101 110101 000111010010 0101001101 1101111101 1100010111 1111010101 010100 010101101 11010111 111101 1111011101 0111010101 010010111 011101 1111011101 011111 11001111 1111010101 11011100101 0111111010 010 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 4,300 |
Words | 817 |
Sentences | 10 |
Stanzas | 6 |
Stanza Lengths | 9, 13, 24, 24, 32, 13 |
Lines Amount | 115 |
Letters per line (avg) | 29 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 565 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 136 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on April 27, 2023
- 4:05 min read
- 449 Views
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"The Man Against the Sky" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 11 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/10053/the-man-against-the-sky>.
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