Analysis of When May Comes



When May comes,
every year,
and the smell of lilac hangs heavy,
I am plucked from my body,
like a berry from a bush,
and planted on my mother's lawn.

Every May,
it never fails,
I am brought back
by memory or a trickster god
to the purple lilac tree in that green green garden.

I have known,
as have you I'm sure,
a surge of desperate homesickness,
strong enough to steal my breath.
And I have felt sick to the bone
with desire to return to places
that no longer exist.

I have wrapped myself
in new people,
in new places
to cover up the taste
of my mother's cooking.

And you can jump into the creek behind your childhood home,
of course you can,
but it won't be the same water.

And I can spend hours with my face in a lilac tree,
but the smell will never be as sweet
as the one stood on my mother's lawn.


Scheme XXAAXB XXXXC DXXXDEX XXEXX XCX AXB
Poetic Form
Metre 111 1001 00111110 1111110 1010101 01011101 1001 1101 1111 110010101 101011011110 111 11111 0111010 1011111 01111101 1010101110 111001 1111 0110 0110 110101 111010 0111010101111 1111 11110110 0111101110011 101110111 101111101
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 818
Words 192
Sentences 8
Stanzas 6
Stanza Lengths 6, 5, 7, 5, 3, 3
Lines Amount 29
Letters per line (avg) 21
Words per line (avg) 6
Letters per stanza (avg) 103
Words per stanza (avg) 27
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Written on January 05, 2023

Submitted on August 21, 2023

59 sec read
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