Analysis of The Wreck of the Hesperus
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1807 (Portland) – 1882 (Cambridge)
It was the schooner Hesperus,
That sailed the wint'ry sea;
And the skipper had taken his little daughter,
To bear him company.
Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax,
Her cheeks like the dawn of day,
And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds
That ope in the month of May.
The skipper he stood beside the helm,
His pipe was in his mouth,
And watched how the veering flaw did blow
The smoke now West, now South.
Then up and spake an old Sailor,
Had sailed the Spanish Main,
"I pray thee put into yonder port,
For I fear a hurricane.
"Last night, the moon had a golden ring,
And tonight no moon we see!"
The skipper, he blew a whiff from his pipe,
And a scornful laugh laughed he.
Colder and louder blew the wind,
A gale from the North-east;
The snow fell hissing in the brine,
And the billows frothed like yeast.
Down came the storm, and smote amain
The vessel in its strength;
She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed,
Then leaped her cable's length.
"Come hither! come hither! my little daughter,
And do not tremble so;
For I can weather the roughest gale
That ever wind did blow."
He wrapped her warm in his seaman's coat
Against the stinging blast;
He cut a rope from a broken spar,
And bound her to the mast.
"O father! I hear the church-bells ring,
O say what may it be?"
"'Tis a fog-bell on a rock-bound coast!"
And he steered for the open sea.
"O father! I hear the sound of guns,
O say what may it be?"
"Some ship in distress, that cannot live
In such an angry sea!"
"O father! I see a gleaming light,
O say what may it be?"
But the father answered never a word,
A frozen corpse was he.
Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark,
With his face turned to the skies,
The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow
On his fixed and glassy eyes.
Then the maiden clasped her hands and prayed
That saved she might be;
And she thought of Christ who stilled the wave
On the Lake of Galilee.
And fast through the midnight dark and drear,
Through the whistling sleet and snow,
Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept
Towards the reef of Norman's Woe.
And ever the fitful gusts between
A sound came from the land;
It was the sound of the trampling surf,
On the rocks and the hard sea-sand.
The breakers were right beneath her bows,
She drifted a dreary wreck,
And a whooping billow swept the crew
Like icicles from her deck.
She struck where the white and fleecy waves
Looked soft as carded wool,
But the cruel rocks, they gored her sides
Like the horns of an angry bull.
Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice,
With the masts went by the board;
Like a vessel of glass she stove and sank,
Ho! ho! the breakers roared!
At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach,
A fisherman stood aghast,
To see the form of a maiden fair
Lashed close to a drifting mast.
The salt sea was frozen on her breast,
The salt tears in her eyes;
And he saw her hair, like the brown seaweed,
On the billows fall and rise.
Such was the wreck of the Hesperus,
In the midnight and the snow!
Christ save us all from a death like this
On the reef of Norman's Woe!
Scheme | aabc adad xefe bgxg haxc xixi cjkj baxf xlxl hCxa aCxa xCxc xafa xcxc bfxf xmxm anxn aoao apxp xlxl xaka afaf |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Quatrain (95%) |
Metre | 110101 11011 001011011010 111100 100110101 0110111 001011011 1100111 010110101 111011 011010111 011111 11011110 110101 111101101 111010 110110101 0011111 0101101111 0010111 10010101 011011 01110001 0010111 1101011 010011 110011011 110101 11011011010 011101 111100101 110111 110101101 010101 110110101 010101 110110111 111111 101110111 01110101 110110111 111111 110011101 011101 110110101 111111 1010101001 010111 11011101 1111101 010110101 1110101 101010101 11111 011111101 101110 01101101 1010101 10110101 01011101 010010101 011101 110110101 10100111 010010101 1100101 001010101 1100101 111010101 111101 101011101 10111101 01011101 1011101 1010111101 110101 1110111 010101 110110101 1110101 011110101 011001 011011011 1010101 1101101 001001 111110111 1011101 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 2,945 |
Words | 587 |
Sentences | 36 |
Stanzas | 22 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4 |
Lines Amount | 88 |
Letters per line (avg) | 26 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 106 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 26 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 30, 2023
- 2:55 min read
- 326 Views
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"The Wreck of the Hesperus" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 31 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/18960/the-wreck-of-the-hesperus>.
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