Analysis of Castles In Spain. (Birds Of Passage. Flight The Fifth)
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1807 (Portland) – 1882 (Cambridge)
How much of my young heart, O Spain,
Went out to thee in days of yore!
What dreams romantic filled my brain,
And summoned back to life again
The Paladins of Charlemagne,
The Cid Campeador!
And shapes more shadowy than these,
In the dim twilight half revealed;
Phoenician galleys on the seas,
The Roman camps like hives of bees,
The Goth uplifting from his knees
Pelayo on his shield.
It was these memories perchance,
From annals of remotest eld,
That lent the colors of romance
To every trivial circumstance,
And changed the form and countenance
Of all that I beheld.
Old towns, whose history lies hid
In monkish chronicle or rhyme,--
Burgos, the birthplace of the Cid,
Zamora and Valladolid,
Toledo, built and walled amid
The wars of Wamba's time;
The long, straight line of the highway,
The distant town that seems so near,
The peasants in the fields, that stay
Their toil to cross themselves and pray,
When from the belfry at midday
The Angelus they hear;
White crosses in the mountain pass,
Mules gay with tassels, the loud din
Of muleteers, the tethered ass
That crops the dusty wayside grass,
And cavaliers with spurs of brass
Alighting at the inn;
White hamlets hidden in fields of wheat,
White cities slumbering by the sea,
White sunshine flooding square and street,
Dark mountain ranges, at whose feet
The river beds are dry with heat,--
All was a dream to me.
Yet something sombre and severe
O'er the enchanted landscape reigned;
A terror in the atmosphere
As if King Philip listened near,
Or Torquemada, the austere,
His ghostly sway maintained.
The softer Andalusian skies
Dispelled the sadness and the gloom;
There Cadiz by the seaside lies,
And Seville's orange-orchards rise,
Making the land a paradise
Of beauty and of bloom.
There Cordova is hidden among
The palm, the olive, and the vine;
Gem of the South, by poets sung,
And in whose Mosque Ahmanzor hung
As lamps the bells that once had rung
At Compostella's shrine.
But over all the rest supreme,
The star of stars, the cynosure,
The artist's and the poet's theme,
The young man's vision, the old man's dream,--
Granada by its winding stream,
The city of the Moor!
And there the Alhambra still recalls
Aladdin's palace of delight;
Allah il Allah! through its halls
Whispers the fountain as it falls,
The Darro darts beneath its walls,
The hills with snow are white.
Ah yes, the hills are white with snow,
And cold with blasts that bite and freeze;
But in the happy vale below
The orange and pomegranate grow,
And wafts of air toss to and fro
The blossoming almond trees.
The Vega cleft by the Xenil,
The fascination and allure
Of the sweet landscape chains the will;
The traveller lingers on the hill,
His parted lips are breathing still
The last sigh of the Moor.
How like a ruin overgrown
With flowers that hide the rents of time,
Stands now the Past that I have known;
Castles in Spain, not built of stone
But of white summer clouds, and blown
Into this little mist of rhyme!
Scheme | ABAAAB CDCCCD EDEEXD FGFDFG HIHHHX JKJJJK LMLLLM INIIIN OPOOXP QRQQQR SBSSST UVUUUV WCWWWC YTYYYT ZGZZZG |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 11111111 11110111 11010111 01011101 01110 011 01110011 0011101 01010101 01011111 0110111 010111 11110001 11010101 11010101 110010010 01010100 11111 11110011 0110011 1001101 01001 01010101 01111 0111101 01011111 01000111 11110101 1101011 0111 11000101 1111011 110101 1101011 0011111 1101 110100111 110100101 1110101 11010111 01011111 110111 1101001 10001011 0100010 11110101 11001 110101 0100101 01010001 1011011 0110101 1001010 110011 11011001 01010001 11011101 001111 11011111 111 11010101 011101 01000101 011100111 01011101 010101 01001011 110101 10110111 10010111 0110111 011111 11011111 01111101 10010101 01000101 01111101 0100101 0101101 0010001 1011101 010010101 11011101 011101 1101001 110110111 11011111 10011111 11110101 01110111 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 2,882 |
Words | 525 |
Sentences | 15 |
Stanzas | 15 |
Stanza Lengths | 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6 |
Lines Amount | 90 |
Letters per line (avg) | 26 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 156 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 35 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 2:40 min read
- 120 Views
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"Castles In Spain. (Birds Of Passage. Flight The Fifth)" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 7 Sep. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/18542/castles-in-spain.-%28birds-of-passage.-flight-the-fifth%29>.
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