Analysis of Sunshine Through A Cobwebbed Window



What charm is yours, you faded old-world tapestries,
Of outworn, childish mysteries,
Vague pageants woven on a web of dream!
And we, pushing and fighting in the turbid stream
Of modern life, find solace in your tarnished broideries.

Old lichened halls, sun-shaded by huge cedar-trees,
The layered branches horizontal stretched, like Japanese
Dark-banded prints. Carven cathedrals, on a sky
Of faintest colour, where the gothic spires fly
And sway like masts, against a shifting breeze.

Worm-eaten pages, clasped in old brown vellum, shrunk
From over-handling, by some anxious monk.
Or Virgin's Hours, bright with gold and graven
With flowers, and rare birds, and all the Saints of Heaven,
And Noah's ark stuck on Ararat, when all the world had sunk.

They soothe us like a song, heard in a garden, sung
By youthful minstrels, on the moonlight flung
In cadences and falls, to ease a queen,
Widowed and childless, cowering in a screen
Of myrtles, whose life hangs with all its threads unstrung.


Scheme AABBA AACCA DDEED FFGGC
Poetic Form
Metre 111111011100 1110100 1101010111 01100100011 110111001101 11111011101 010100101101 11011010101 1101101011 0111010101 11010101111 1101011101 11010111010 1100110101110 01011110110111 111101100101 110101011 0100011101 10010100001 11011111111
Closest metre Iambic hexameter
Characters 980
Words 165
Sentences 8
Stanzas 4
Stanza Lengths 5, 5, 5, 5
Lines Amount 20
Letters per line (avg) 39
Words per line (avg) 8
Letters per stanza (avg) 197
Words per stanza (avg) 41
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 27, 2023

50 sec read
147

Amy Lowell

Amy Lawrence Lowell was an American poet of the imagist school from Brookline, Massachusetts who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926. more…

All Amy Lowell poems | Amy Lowell Books

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