Analysis of Tomb of Mohomed Shah
Letitia Elizabeth Landon 1802 (Chelsea) – 1838 (Cape Coast)
WHAT do they call a happy end,
How did the monarch die ?
The purple for his winding sheet,
His courtiers standing by ;
A shadow upon every brow,
A tear in every eye.
Methinks if I could choose my death,
Such end should not be mine;
I'd rather fall where banners wave,
And muskets glittering shine,
While onwards to its vengeance prest,
My own embattled line.
I could not bear to see around,
The faithful and the fond;
The faces that I dearly loved,
I could not look beyond—
The deep affection of this earth
Would be too dear a bond.
He died, and by his death-bed stood
The wife, the child, the friend,
And saw pale cheek and anxious eye
O’er him in fondness bend.
Oh, agony !—how could they, King,
Call thine a happy end ?
THE tomb of the Sultan lies under a wooden canopy, in the centre of the room, on a platform of granite eighty feet square, and is raised four feet above the level of the floor. Over a lofty door-way, through which you enter on the southern side, are some Arabic inscriptions in Togra letters, which are sculptured in alto-relievo. The characters are gilded, and the ground is granited with a liquid preparation of rajaward, or lapis lazuli, which gives the whole an appearance of a beautiful distribution of gold and enamels. All the inscriptions that I shall have occasion to mention are sculptured and ornamented after this fashion ; and being disposed in all varieties of shape and figure, have a very elegant effect. They are said to be all extracts from the Koran, but
the characters are so entwined and interwoven with each other, that the quickest reader of this hand would find some difficulty in deciphering them. I was, however, successful in discovering a Persian inscription line, which is a chronogram on the death of the Sultan Mahomed. The line translated is, “The end of Mahomed was
happy.”—Elliot's Views in India
Scheme | ABXBXB XCXCXC XDXDXD XABAXA XXX |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 11110101 11011 01011101 1100101 01011001 0101001 1111111 111111 11011101 011001 11011101 110101 11111101 010001 01011101 111101 01010111 111101 11011111 010101 01110101 110101 11001111 110101 011010110010100001010110111010110111101010101100101111110101011110001001101110010101001100011110100101111001011011010101000101100101001011110101101100100101100100101010011010101010001111111110011 01001101001011101010101111111000001001111001000100010010111011011010101010101111 10110100 |
Characters | 1,839 |
Words | 329 |
Sentences | 15 |
Stanzas | 5 |
Stanza Lengths | 6, 6, 6, 6, 3 |
Lines Amount | 27 |
Letters per line (avg) | 54 |
Words per line (avg) | 12 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 292 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 66 |
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