Analysis of THE VERDILLAC (I)
Phil Roberts 1957 (Melbourne)
Banshees shrieking in the night
Warn of dangers lurking in the black,
The smell of death is a warning of
The approaching verdillac.
A monster from myth or awful fact?
No-one can say for sure,
But those who know the smell of death
Stay inside behind bolted door.
When the verdillac is passing through
Little is left living in its wake,
People inside cover their ears to the sound
That their slaughtered animals make.
Farms are stripped of life as though
The victim of a locust plague,
But not plants but animals are taken as
The verdillac devours all beasts chained or caged.
Unchained beasts may stampede to safety
Till the verdillac hunts them down,
Then by the time the humans dare to emerge
No living creature can be found.
A faceless, fearless monster
From fact or fiction? None can say,
But those who dare to investigate
Go screaming to an early grave.
In the big cities, we think we are safe
For the verdillac has nowhere to hide,
But from time to time human corpses are found
Mere skeletons screaming as they died.
As cities encroach on the countryside
The verdillac must soon decide,
Whether to keep moving further bush
Or find dark alleyways in which to hide.
Until the last creature on the planet
Has been devoured by the verdillac,
No matter how long it stays away
We know that one day it will be back.
THE END
© Copyright 2021 Philip Roberts
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Scheme | XAXA XXXX XBCB XXXX XXXC XDXX XECE EEXE XADA XXX |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 110001 111010001 011110101 00101 010111101 111111 11110111 10101101 1011101 101110011 10011011101 11101001 1111111 01010101 11111001101 0101011111 11101110 101111 11010101101 11010111 0101010 11110111 11111010 11011101 0011011111 1011111 11111101011 110010111 110011010 01111 101110101 111100111 0101101010 11010101 110111101 111111111 01 101010 100100010 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,349 |
Words | 248 |
Sentences | 12 |
Stanzas | 10 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 3 |
Lines Amount | 39 |
Letters per line (avg) | 28 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 111 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 25 |
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