Analysis of The Praise of Dust
Gilbert Keith Chesterton 1874 (Kensington, London) – 1936 (Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire)
'What of vile dust?' the preacher said.
Methought the whole world woke,
The dead stone lived beneath my foot,
And my whole body spoke.
'You, that play tyrant to the dust,
And stamp its wrinkled face,
This patient star that flings you not
Far into homeless space.
'Come down out of your dusty shrine
The living dust to see,
The flowers that at your sermon's end
Stand blazing silently.
'Rich white and blood-red blossom; stones,
Lichens like fire encrust;
A gleam of blue, a glare of gold,
The vision of the dust.
'Pass them all by: till, as you come
Where, at a city's edge,
Under a tree-I know it well-
Under a lattice ledge,
'The sunshine falls on one brown head.
You, too, O cold of clay,
Eater of stones, may haply hear
The trumpets of that day
'When God to all his paladins
By his own splendour swore
To make a fairer face than heaven,
Of dust and nothing more.'
Scheme | ABXB CDXD XEXE XCXC XFXF AGXG DHXH |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Quatrain |
Metre | 11110101 10111 01110111 011101 11110101 011101 11011111 101101 11111101 010111 01011111 110100 11011101 1011001 01110111 010101 11111111 110101 10011111 100101 0111111 111111 1011111 010111 111111 11111 110101110 110101 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 876 |
Words | 166 |
Sentences | 9 |
Stanzas | 7 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4 |
Lines Amount | 28 |
Letters per line (avg) | 24 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 95 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 23 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 49 sec read
- 74 Views
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