Analysis of The Poet
THEY tell you the poet is useless and empty the sound of his lyre,
That science has made him a phantom, and thinned to a shadow his fire:
Yet reformer has never demolished a dungeon or den of the foe
But the flame of the soul of a poet pulsated in every blow.
They tell you he hinders with tinklings, with gags from an obsolete stage,
The dramas of deed and the worship of Laws in a practical age:
But the deeds of to-day are the children of magical dreams he has sung,
And the Laws are ineffable Fires that from niggardly heaven he wrung!
The bosoms of women he sang of are heaving to-day in our maids:
The God that he drew from the Silence our woes or our weariness aids:
Not a maxim has needled through Time, but a poet had feathered its shaft,
Not a law is a boon to the people but he has dictated its draft.
And why do we fight for our fellows? For Liberty why do we long?
Because with the core of our nerve-cells are woven the lightnings of song!
For the poet for ages illumined the animal dreams of our sires,
And his Thought-Become-Flesh is the matrix of all our unselfish desires!
Yea, why are we fain for the Beautiful? Why should we die for the Right?
Because through the forested æons, in spite of the priests of the Night,
Undeterred by the faggot or cross, uncorrupted by glory or gold,
To our mothers the poet his Vision of Goodness and Beauty has told.
When, comrades, we thrill to the message of speaker in highway or hall,
The voice of the poet is reaching the silenter poet in all:
And again, as of old, when the flames are to leap up the turrets of Wrong,
Shall the torch of the New Revolution be lit from the words of a Song
Scheme | XXAA BBCC DDEE FFXX GGHH IIFF |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Quatrain (67%) |
Metre | 11101011001001111 11011101001101110 101011001001011101 1011011010101001 111110111111101 01011001011001001 101111101011001111 0011010010111001011 01110111110110101 0111110101011101001 101011011101011011 101101101011101011 011111101011001111 011011101111001011 1010110010010011101 011011101011101010 11111101001111101 0110100101101101 01101011111011 1101001011011001011 111110101100111 011010110011001 001111101111101011 10110101011101101 |
Characters | 1,742 |
Words | 321 |
Sentences | 11 |
Stanzas | 6 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4 |
Lines Amount | 24 |
Letters per line (avg) | 54 |
Words per line (avg) | 13 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 215 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 53 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:36 min read
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"The Poet" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 12 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/4285/the-poet>.
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