Analysis of Red Pencil
Thomas Molitor 1953 (Tacoma)
I can still feel your slashing notations that nearly
murdered my love affair with words, knifing
run-on sentences, strangling dangling modifiers,
eviscerating verbs not in agreement with their subjects.
Lost are the faces but not the traces
of your willing accomplices,
the semantic and pedantic
wielding weapons of academic authority.
They graded and raided, scraped and raped
virgin paper with a cruelly sharpened point, leaving
behind a blood-stained hexagonal wooden barrel grip
at the scene of the crime.
Go now, go away and board the No. 2 train back
to Ticonderoga, or wherever you are made today,
for now I have poetic license and the freedom to drive
the ungrammatical roads of play.
Scheme | ABCC CCXA XBXX XDXD |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Quatrain (25%) |
Metre | 1111110010110 1011011110 111001001001 11100101110 1101011010 11100100 00100010 101010100100 110010101 1010101010110 01011010010101 101101 11101010111 10010101011101 111101010001011 01111 |
Closest metre | Iambic hexameter |
Characters | 712 |
Words | 130 |
Sentences | 6 |
Stanzas | 4 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4 |
Lines Amount | 16 |
Letters per line (avg) | 35 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 141 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 28 |
About this poem
An autobiographical memory of the authoritarian rules of grammar and those who taught them.
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"Red Pencil" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 1 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/133734/red-pencil>.
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