Analysis of Robert Oppenheimer- Martyr with a Radioactive Half-Life
Ron Marcus 1957 (Baltimore)
Memory haunted me,
like a too familiar ghost
Rememberance
attacked me
from miles deep
inside the rotting splendor, of the Grave.
with the insistent spirts
of 100 thousand:
:incinerated,vaporized
& grotesquely disfigured souls/
justifiably accusing me
of horrfically,cultivated
indifference.
For when Guilt-
becomes omnipotent
,All is lost.
Had I dared like Icarus
to fly too close
to the aggrieved Sun
we unwittingly made
with most unwanted
epiphany, a sobering
gravitas
in its charismatically
Heretical power
of how we burned the
midnight oil
as some kind of Holy
sacrament
all for the unthinkable
Creation
of our longed for, beloved Monster
at Los Alamos,
Our unforgivable
complicity
Bouncing Calculus
equations
off each each other's
Hardball heads
with a frantic sputtering/
of cognitive explosions/
that would all too easily rival
and quite possibly surpass, & certainly
bewilder/
the Schizophrenic
temperament/
of the Atom
As I was but a helplessd witness
and began to feel-
waywardly too similar
to that breathtaking
Science, of growing
Dread/
in Kurosawa's "Rashomon"
where all the Asian
spirits
have a different story
to tell
about their complete
Undoing
bY Ron Marcus
Scheme | ABCAXX CXBCABCXDX CCEXXFCGH XGADGEH CGACCCCFCGAHXDX CGHFFXEECAGXF C |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 100101 1010101 1 011 111 0101010101 100101 110 1 0100101 10000101 11 0100 111 010100 111 111110 1111 10011 101001 11010 01000100 100 011 010010 11110 11 111110 100 1100100 010 110110110 11100 100100 0100 10100 010 11110 11 1010100 1100010 111110010 0110001100 010 0010 100 1010 11110110 00111 11100 1110 10110 1 011 11010 10 1010010 11 01101 010 1110 |
Closest metre | Iambic trimeter |
Characters | 1,139 |
Words | 185 |
Sentences | 4 |
Stanzas | 7 |
Stanza Lengths | 6, 10, 9, 7, 15, 13, 1 |
Lines Amount | 61 |
Letters per line (avg) | 16 |
Words per line (avg) | 3 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 140 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 26 |
About this poem
This poem revolves about a great man's guilty conscience, and is an integral part of a book length collection.
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"Robert Oppenheimer- Martyr with a Radioactive Half-Life" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 2 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/112903/robert-oppenheimer--martyr-with-a-radioactive-half-life>.
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