Analysis of Tales Of A Wayside Inn : Part 2. The Musician's Tale; The Ballad of Carmilhan - I.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1807 (Portland) – 1882 (Cambridge)
At Stralsund, by the Baltic Sea,
Within the sandy bar,
At sunset of a summer's day,
Ready for sea, at anchor lay
The good ship Valdemar.
The sunbeams danced upon the waves,
And played along her side;
And through the cabin windows streamed
In ripples of golden light, that seemed
The ripple of the tide.
There sat the captain with his friends,
Old skippers brown and hale,
Who smoked and grumbled o'er their grog,
And talked of iceberg and of fog,
Of calm and storm and gale.
And one was spinning a sailor's yarn
About Klaboterman,
The Kobold of the sea; a spright
Invisible to mortal sight,
Who o'er the rigging ran.
Sometimes he hammered in the hold,
Sometimes upon the mast,
Sometimes abeam, sometimes abaft,
Or at the bows he sang and laughed,
And made all tight and fast.
He helped the sailors at their work,
And toiled with jovial din;
He helped them hoist and reef the sails,
He helped them stow the casks and bales,
And heave the anchor in.
But woe unto the lazy louts,
The idlers of the crew;
Them to torment was his delight,
And worry them by day and night,
And pinch them black and blue.
And woe to him whose mortal eyes
Klaboterman behold.
It is a certain sign of death!?
The cabin-boy here held his breath,
He felt his blood run cold.
Scheme | XABBA XCDDC XEFFE GGBHX IJBXJ XKLLK XMHHM XINNI |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Etheree (35%) |
Metre | 1110101 010101 1110101 10111101 011001 0110101 010101 01010101 010110111 010101 11010111 110101 110101011 01110011 110101 011100101 011 0110101 01001101 1100101 01110001 010101 011011 11011101 011101 11010111 0111001 11110101 11110101 010100 11100101 01101 1111101 01011101 011101 01111101 101 11010111 01011111 111111 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,216 |
Words | 233 |
Sentences | 11 |
Stanzas | 8 |
Stanza Lengths | 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5 |
Lines Amount | 40 |
Letters per line (avg) | 24 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 121 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 29 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:11 min read
- 105 Views
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"Tales Of A Wayside Inn : Part 2. The Musician's Tale; The Ballad of Carmilhan - I." Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 5 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/18782/tales-of-a-wayside-inn-%3A-part-2.-the-musician%27s-tale%3B-the-ballad-of-carmilhan---i.>.
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