The Alien
A petal drifted looseFrom a great magnolia bloom,Your face hung in the gloom,Floating, white and close.
We seemed alone: but anotherBent o'er you with lips of flame,Unknown, without a name,Hated, and yet my brother.
Your one short moan of painWas an exorcising spell:The devil flew back to hell;We were alone again.
About this text
The Alien is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Defeat of Youth, and Other Poems, Project Gutenberg ebook #24364; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Aldous Huxley, The Alien, in The Defeat of Youth, and Other Poems (1918), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #24364, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/huxley-defeat-of-youth/the-alien.html, id L22018.
Form and metre
The Alien is 12 lines in 3 stanzas of 4 lines each. The rhyme scheme is ABBA, complete in 2 of its 3 stanzas. The metre is iambic trimeter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 91%).
See other poems in iambic trimeter.
Measured by Laurel's pipeline, not copied from a handbook: how stress and metre are counted, how rhyme is lettered, how a drifted rhyme is found. Where the dictionary cannot confirm a rhyme the letter is withheld, not guessed.
Rhyme words, stanza by stanza
The word that ends each line, lettered by the rhyme it makes; a dash is a line whose rhyme the dictionary could not confirm.
- 1 -AA- loose · bloomA · gloomA · close
- 2 ABBA anotherA · flameB · nameB · brotherA
- 3 ABBA painA · spellB · hellB · againA
Scansion, line by line
Each line with its syllable count and the stresses the words themselves fix: / stressed, ˘ unstressed, · a syllable the word leaves free and the metre decides. Read against iambic trimeter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| A petal drifted loose | 6 | ·/˘/˘· |
| From a great magnolia bloom, | 7 | ···˘/˘· |
| Your face hung in the gloom, | 6 | ······ |
| Floating, white and close. | 5 | /˘··· |
| We seemed alone: but another | 8 | ··˘/·˘/˘ |
| Bent o'er you with lips of flame, | 7 | ······· |
| Unknown, without a name, | 6 | ˘/···· |
| Hated, and yet my brother. | 7 | /˘···/˘ |
| Your one short moan of pain | 6 | ······ |
| Was an exorcising spell: | 7 | ······· |
| The devil flew back to hell; | 6 | ·/···· |
| We were alone again. | 6 | ··˘/˘/ |
The reader shows the same poem with its rhymes coloured and a stress row above each line, the notes beside their stanzas, and any word's definition on a tap; the analysis page takes the whole book apart. How every part of this site was made.