Analysis of Dawn
John Gould Fletcher 1886 (Little Rock) – 1950
Above the east horizon,
The great red flower of the dawn
Opens slowly, petal by petal;
The trees emerge from darkness
With ghostly silver leaves,
Dew powdered.
Now consciousness emerges
Reluctantly out of tides of sleep;
Finding with cold surprise
No strange new thing to match its dreams,
But merely the familiar shapes
Of bedpost, window-pane, and wall.
Within the city,
The streets which were the last to fall to sleep,
Hold yet stale fragments of the night.
Sleep oozes out of stagnant ash-barrels,
Sleep drowses over litter in the streets.
Sleep nods upon the milkcans by back doors.
And, in shut rooms,
Behind the lowered window-blinds,
Drawn white faces unwittingly flout the day.
But, at the edges of the city,
Sleep is already washed away;
Light filters through the moist green leaves,
It runs into the cups of flowers,
It leaps in sparks through drops of dew,
It whirls against the window-panes
With waking birds;
Blinds are rolled up and chimneys smoke,
Feet clatter past in silent paths,
And down white vanishing ways of steel,
A dozen railway trains converge
Upon night’s stronghold.
Scheme | XXXXAXXBXXXX CBXXXXXXD CDAXXXXXXXXX |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 0101010 01110101 101010110 0101110 110101 110 1100010 010011111 101101 11111111 11000101 1110101 01010 0110011111 11110101 1101110110 111010001 110101111 0011 01010101 11100100101 110101010 11010101 11010111 110101110 11011111 11010101 1101 11110101 11010101 011100111 0101101 0111 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,066 |
Words | 184 |
Sentences | 7 |
Stanzas | 3 |
Stanza Lengths | 12, 9, 12 |
Lines Amount | 33 |
Letters per line (avg) | 27 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 292 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 61 |
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"Dawn" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 13 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/54105/dawn>.
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