Analysis of Hindoo Temples at Benares
Letitia Elizabeth Landon 1802 (Chelsea) – 1838 (Cape Coast)
AND day by day, and hour by hour,
The sacred stream floats past,
And rises higher o’er the shrines,
Doomed to its depths at last.
And soon above those stately domes
The fatal tide will flow,
And carved spire and sculptured tower
Sleep in the depths below
The temples have no worshippers,
The altar be unknown,
And weed and ooze in darkness rest
Upon the polished stone.
Oh, likeness of humanity,
’Tis thus that life flows on,
Till every fabric which we built
In early youth is gone.
The sacred and the beautiful,
The mighty and sublime ;
Alas, in vain, the heart would save
One single wreck from time.
The Temples to which the above lines allude, are already half immersed in water; a few more years, and the stream which was once their mirror, will be their shroud.
It is curious to observe how general is the tradition of man’s deterioration: the Bramins say, that the Ganges first rose at Benares—a more sinful generation saw it recede to Hurdwar—a third had to follow it to Burahat—and the fourth age finds it still further off, as it has now its source amid the heights of Gungoutri.
Scheme | ABXB XCAC XDXD XXXX XEXE XA |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 0111010110 010111 01010101 111111 01011101 010111 01101010 100101 01011100 010101 01010101 010101 11010100 111111 110010111 010111 01000100 010001 01010111 110111 01011001101101010101001110011111101111 1110010111001001011010000111010111101100101101110111101110011111101111111010111 |
Closest metre | Iambic hexameter |
Characters | 1,080 |
Words | 196 |
Sentences | 6 |
Stanzas | 6 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 2 |
Lines Amount | 22 |
Letters per line (avg) | 39 |
Words per line (avg) | 9 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 143 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 33 |
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"Hindoo Temples at Benares" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 26 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/45074/hindoo-temples-at-benares>.
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