Analysis of The Garden by Moonlight

Amy Lowell 1874 (Brookline) – 1925 (Brookline)



A black cat among roses,
Phlox, lilac-misted under a first-quarter moon,
The sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock.
The garden is very still,
It is dazed with moonlight,
Contented with perfume,
Dreaming the opium dreams of its folded poppies.
Firefly lights open and vanish
High as the tip buds of the golden glow
Low as the sweet alyssum flowers at my feet.
Moon-shimmer on leaves and trellises,
Moon-spikes shafting through the snowball bush.
Only the little faces of the ladies' delight are alert and staring,
Only the cat, padding between the roses,
Shakes a branch and breaks the chequered pattern
As water is broken by the falling of a leaf.
Then you come,
And you are quiet like the garden,
And white like the alyssum flowers,
And beautiful as the silent sparks of the fireflies.
Ah, Beloved, do you see those orange lilies?
They knew my mother,
But who belonging to me will they know
When I am gone.


Scheme ABCDEFGHIJAKLAMNOPQRGSIT
Poetic Form
Metre 0110110 1111001101 011110001101 0101101 11111 010101 1001001111010 10110010 1101110101 1101110111 1101101 11101011 1001010101001101010 10011001010 101010110 1101101010101 111 011101010 0110110 0100101011010 10111111010 11110 1101011111 1111
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 928
Words 162
Sentences 9
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 24
Lines Amount 24
Letters per line (avg) 30
Words per line (avg) 7
Letters per stanza (avg) 731
Words per stanza (avg) 160
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 21, 2023

48 sec read
129

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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