Analysis of Portrait of a Lady

William Carlos Williams 1883 (Rutherford) – 1963 (Rutherford)



Your thighs are appletrees
whose blossoms touch the sky.
Which sky? The sky
where Watteau hung a lady's
slipper. Your knees
are a southern breeze -- or
a gust of snow. Agh! what
sort of man was Fragonard?
-- As if that answered
anything. -- Ah, yes. Below
the knees, since the tune
drops that way, it is
one of those white summer days,
the tall grass of your ankles
flickers upon the shore --
Which shore? --
the sand clings to my lips --
Which shore?
Agh, petals maybe. How
should I know?
Which shore? Which shore?
-- the petals from some hidden
appletree -- Which shore?
I said petals from an appletree.


Scheme abbaacdeefgaaacCaChfcicc
Poetic Form
Metre 1111 110101 1101 111010 1011 101011 011111 1111100 11110 101101 01101 11111 1111101 0111110 100101 11 011111 11 110101 111 1111 0101110 111 1110111
Closest metre Iambic trimeter
Characters 590
Words 116
Sentences 17
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 24
Lines Amount 24
Letters per line (avg) 19
Words per line (avg) 5
Letters per stanza (avg) 454
Words per stanza (avg) 114
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on May 03, 2023

35 sec read
846

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams was a Latino-American poet closely associated with modernism and imagism. more…

All William Carlos Williams poems | William Carlos Williams Books

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