Analysis of Reach Your Hand To Me

James Whitcomb Riley 1849 (Greenfield) – 1916 (Indianapolis)



Reach your hand to me, my friend,
With its heartiest caress--
Sometime there will come an end
To its present faithfulness--
Sometime I may ask in vain
For the touch of it again,
When between us land or sea
Holds it ever back from me.

Sometime I may need it so,
Groping somewhere in the night,
It will seem to me as though
Just a touch, however light,
Would make all the darkness day,
And along some sunny way
Lead me through an April-shower
Of my tears to this fair hour.

O the present is too sweet
To go on forever thus!
Round the corner of the street
Who can say what waits for us?--
Meeting--greeting, night and day,
Faring each the self-same way--
Still somewhere the path must end.--
Reach your hand to me, my friend!


Scheme Ababxxcc dedeffgg hihiffaA
Poetic Form
Metre 1111111 1110001 111111 11101 111101 1011101 1011111 1110111 111111 101001 1111111 101101 1110101 0011101 11111010 11111110 1010111 1110101 1010101 1111111 1010101 1010111 110111 1111111
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 707
Words 141
Sentences 7
Stanzas 3
Stanza Lengths 8, 8, 8
Lines Amount 24
Letters per line (avg) 23
Words per line (avg) 6
Letters per stanza (avg) 185
Words per stanza (avg) 46
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

42 sec read
65

James Whitcomb Riley

James Whitcomb Riley was an American writer, poet, and best-selling author. During his lifetime he was known as the "Hoosier Poet" and "Children's Poet" for his dialect works and his children's poetry respectively. more…

All James Whitcomb Riley poems | James Whitcomb Riley Books

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