Analysis of Between Prologue and Epilogue
Pratip Sen Gupta 1959 (Kolkata)
let it burn
only embers await fire
as ashes await embers
somewhere between
kindling and extinction,
prologue and epilogue,
flames and stories
consumed and opiated
a delusion of infinite existence
unbroken by death or irrelevance
covered as dust or denial
the bookshelves of our Truth
the emptiness of our Room
the papered panes
or those covered with the opacity
of disuse and dirt,
let in no sliver of sunshine
on which the Dance of Dust and Entropy
could claim sanity of Decay,
that inevitable nemesis of Perpetuity -
the perpetuity of Conceit,
the perpetuity of a phantasmagoria
called Life
let it burn
so what?
so what if we left the water
at the edge of our desert
so what if in the end
ashes cover the sand
and the extinction is of ourselves
and not the fire
the fire that consumed everything
everything that was worth it
between Prologue and Epilogue
Scheme | Abx xxcxd eexxx xddxxxddxx Adbdddxbxdc |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 111 10100110 1100110 101 100010 10010 1010 0101 00101100010 0101110100 10111010 011101 01001101 0101 1110100100 10101 1011011 1101110100 11100101 10100010010100 00100101 001001000100 11 111 11 11111010 10111010 111001 101001 0001011001 01010 01010110 101111 0110010 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 864 |
Words | 165 |
Sentences | 2 |
Stanzas | 5 |
Stanza Lengths | 3, 5, 5, 10, 11 |
Lines Amount | 34 |
Letters per line (avg) | 21 |
Words per line (avg) | 4 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 140 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 30 |
About this poem
The poem is a reflection on life, whether it amounts to something or is best forgotten as nothing significant, merely irrelevant, or just some conceit or hallucination of the 'liver'.
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"Between Prologue and Epilogue" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 31 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/172818/between-prologue-and-epilogue>.
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