Analysis of London Roses

Willa Sibert Cather 1873 (Gore, Virginia) – 1947 ( Manhattan, New York)



'ROWSES, Rowses! Penny a bunch!' they tell you--
Slattern girls in Trafalgar, eager to sell you.
Roses, roses, red in the Kensington sun,
Holland Road, High Street, Bayswater, see you and smell you--
Roses of London town, red till the summer is done.

Roses, roses, locust and lilac, perfuming
West End, East End, wondrously budding and blooming
Out of the black earth, rubbed in a million hands,
Foot-trod, sweat-sour over and under, entombing
Highways of darkness, deep gutted with iron bands.

'Rowses, rowses! Penny a bunch!' they tell you,
Ruddy blooms of corruption, see you and smell you,
Born of stale earth, fallowed with squalor and tears--
North shire, south shire, none are like these, I tell you,
Roses of London perfumed with a thousand years.


Scheme Aabab ccdcd Aaxax
Poetic Form
Metre 111001111 11001010111 10101001001 10111111011 1011011101011 10101001010 1111110010 11011100101 11110100101 11101101101 111001111 101101011011 1111111001 11111111111 101100110101
Closest metre Iambic hexameter
Characters 749
Words 130
Sentences 9
Stanzas 3
Stanza Lengths 5, 5, 5
Lines Amount 15
Letters per line (avg) 39
Words per line (avg) 8
Letters per stanza (avg) 194
Words per stanza (avg) 42
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

38 sec read
116

Willa Sibert Cather

Willa Sibert Cather (; December 7, 1873 – April 24, 1947) was an American writer who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918). In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I. Cather graduated from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She lived and worked in Pittsburgh for ten years, supporting herself as a magazine editor and high school English teacher. At the age of 33, she moved to New York City, her primary home for the rest of her life, though she also traveled widely and spent considerable time at her summer residence on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick.  more…

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