Analysis of Neither Snow
William Taylor Collins 1721 (Sussex) – 1759 (Sussex)
When all of a sudden the city air filled with snow,
the distinguishable flakes
blowing sideways,
looked like krill
fleeing the maw of an advancing whale.
At least they looked that way to me
from the taxi window,
and since I happened to be sitting
that fading Sunday afternoon
in the very center of the universe,
who was in a better position
to say what looked like what,
which thing resembled some other?
Yes, it was a run of white plankton
borne down the Avenue of the Americas
in the stream of the wind,
phosphorescent against the weighty buildings.
Which made the taxi itself,
yellow and slow-moving,
a kind of undersea creature,
I thought as I wiped the fog from the glass,
and me one of its protruding eyes,
an eye on a stem
swiveling this way and that
monitoring one side of its world,
observing tons of water
tons of people
colored signs and lights
and now a wildly blowing race of snow.
Scheme | AXXXX XABXXCXD CXXX XBDXXXXXDXXA |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 1110100101111 0010001 101 111 1001110101 11111111 101010 011101110 110101 0010101010 110010010 111111 11010110 111011110 11010100100 001101 10101010 1101001 100110 0110110 1111101101 011110101 11101 1001101 100011111 0101110 1110 10101 0101010111 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 874 |
Words | 166 |
Sentences | 5 |
Stanzas | 4 |
Stanza Lengths | 5, 8, 4, 12 |
Lines Amount | 29 |
Letters per line (avg) | 25 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 178 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 41 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 49 sec read
- 44 Views
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"Neither Snow" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 12 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/41725/neither-snow>.
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