Analysis of Evening Twilight
Charles Baudelaire 1821 (Paris) – 1867 (Paris)
Here’s the criminal’s friend, delightful evening:
come like an accomplice, with a wolf’s loping:
slowly the sky’s vast vault hides each feature,
and restless man becomes a savage creature.
Evening, sweet evening, desired by him who can say
without his arms proving him a liar: ‘Today
we’ve worked!’ – It refreshes, this evening hour,
those spirits that savage miseries devour,
the dedicated scholar with heavy head,
the bowed workman stumbling home to bed.
Yet now unhealthy demons rise again
clumsily, in the air, like busy men,
beat against sheds and arches in their flight.
And among the wind-tormented gas-lights
Prostitution switches on through the streets
opening her passageways like an ant-heap:
weaving her secret tunnels everywhere,
like an enemy planning a coup, she’s there
burrowing into the wombs of the city’s mires,
like a worm stealing from Man what it desires.
Here, there, you catch the kitchens’ whistles,
the orchestras’ droning, the theatres’ yells,
low dives where gambling’s all the pleasure,
filling with whores, and crooks, their partners,
and the thieves who show no respite or mercy,
will soon be setting to work, as they tenderly,
they too, toil at forcing safes and doorways,
to live, clothe their girls, for a few more days.
Collect yourself, my soul, at this grave hour,
and close your ears to the rising howl.
It’s now that the pains of the sick increase!
Dark Night clasps them by the throat: they reach
their journey’s end, the common pit’s abandon:
the hospital fills with their sighs. – Many a one,
will never return to their warm soup by the fire,
by the hearth, at evening, next to their heart’s desire.
And besides the majority have never known
never having lived, the gentleness of home!
Scheme | AABBCCBBDDEEFGHIJJKLMNBLOOPPBQRSTTBBUV |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 10100101010 1110101011 1001111110 01010101010 1011001011111 011110101001 11101011010 110110100010 01000101101 0110100111 1101010101 1000011101 1011010011 001011011 010101101 100011111 100101010 11100100111 10001011011 101101111010 111101010 01001001001 11111010 101101110 00111110110 111101111100 111110101 1111110111 01011111110 011110101 1110110101 111110111 11010101010 01011111001 1100111111010 1011101111010 001001001101 10101010011 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,739 |
Words | 292 |
Sentences | 12 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 38 |
Lines Amount | 38 |
Letters per line (avg) | 36 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 1,361 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 289 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on May 01, 2023
- 1:27 min read
- 126 Views
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"Evening Twilight" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 2 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/4920/evening-twilight>.
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