Analysis of The Bean-Stalk
Edna St. Vincent Millay 1892 (Rockland) – 1950 (Austerlitz)
Ho, Giant! This is I!
I have built me a bean-stalk into your sky!
La,—but it's lovely, up so high!
This is how I came,—I put
Here my knee, there my foot,
Up and up, from shoot to shoot—
And the blessed bean-stalk thinning
Like the mischief all the time,
Till it took me rocking, spinning,
In a dizzy, sunny circle,
Making angles with the root,
Far and out above the cackle
Of the city I was born in,
Till the little dirty city
In the light so sheer and sunny
Shone as dazzling bright and pretty
As the money that you find
In a dream of finding money—
What a wind! What a morning!—
Till the tiny, shiny city,
When I shot a glance below,
Shaken with a giddy laughter,
Sick and blissfully afraid,
Was a dew-drop on a blade,
And a pair of moments after
Was the whirling guess I made,—
And the wind was like a whip
Cracking past my icy ears,
And my hair stood out behind,
And my eyes were full of tears,
Wide-open and cold,
More tears than they could hold,
The wind was blowing so,
And my teeth were in a row,
Dry and grinning,
And I felt my foot slip,
And I scratched the wind and whined,
And I clutched the stalk and jabbered,
With my eyes shut blind,—
What a wind! What a wind!
Your broad sky, Giant,
Is the shelf of a cupboard;
I make bean-stalks, I'm
A builder, like yourself,
But bean-stalks is my trade,
I couldn't make a shelf,
Don't know how they're made,
Now, a bean-stalk is more pliant—
La, what a climb!
Scheme | AAA BBCDEDFCFXGGGHGD GIJKKJKL XHXMMIIDLBBHH NXEOKOKNE |
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Poetic Form | |
Metre | 110111 11110110111 11110111 1111111 111111 1011111 0011110 1010101 11111010 00101010 1010101 10101010 10101110 10101010 00111010 111001010 1010111 00111010 1011010 10101010 1110101 10101010 1010001 1011101 00111010 1010111 0011101 1011101 0111101 0110111 11001 111111 011101 0110001 1010 011111 0110101 0110101 11111 101101 11110 1011010 11111 010101 111111 110101 11111 10111110 1101 |
Closest metre | Iambic trimeter |
Characters | 1,392 |
Words | 283 |
Sentences | 10 |
Stanzas | 5 |
Stanza Lengths | 3, 16, 8, 13, 9 |
Lines Amount | 49 |
Letters per line (avg) | 22 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 213 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 56 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:26 min read
- 100 Views
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"The Bean-Stalk" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 11 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/9458/the-bean-stalk>.
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