Analysis of Eland’s River
George Essex Evans 1863 (London) – 1909 (Toowoomba)
IT WAS on the fourth of August, as five hundred of us lay
In the camp at Eland’s River, came a shell from De La Rey—
We were dreaming of home faces,
Of the old familiar places,
And the gum-trees and the sunny plains five thousand miles away—
But the challenge woke and found us
With four thousand rifles round us;
And Death stood laughing at us at the breaking of the day.
Hell belched upon our borders, and the battle had begun.
Our Maxims jammed: We faced them with one muzzle-loading gun.
East, south, and west, and nor’ward
Their shells came screaming forward
As we threw the sconces round us in the first light of the sun.
The thin air shook with thunder
As they raked us fore and under,
And the cordon closed around us, as they held us—eight to one.
We got the Maxims going, and the field-gun into place
(She stilled the growling of a Krupp upon our southern face);
Round the crimson ring of battle
Swiftly ran the deadly rattle
As our rifles searched their fore-lines with a desperate menace;
Who would wish himself away
Fighting in our ranks that day
For the glory of Australia and the honour of the race?
But our horse-lines soon were shambles, and our cattle lying dead
(When twelve guns rake two acres there is little room to tread),
All day long we heard the drumming
Of the Mauser bullets humming,
And at night their guns, day-sighted, rained fierce havoc overhead.
Twelve long days and nights together,
Through the cold and bitter weather,
We lay grim behind the sconces, and returned them lead for lead.
They called us to surrender, and they let their cannon lag;
They offered us our freedom for the striking of the flag—
Army stores were there in mounds,
Worth a hundred thousand pounds,
And we lay battered round them behind trench and sconce and crag.
But we sent the answer in,
They could take what they could win—
We hadn’t come five thousand miles to fly the coward’s rag.
We saw the guns of Carrington come on and, fall away;
We saw the ranks of Kitchener across the kopje grey—
For the sun was shining then
Upon twenty thousand men—
And we laughed, because we knew, in spite of hell-fire and delay,
On Australia’s page for ever
We had written Eland’s River—
We had written it for ever and a day!
Scheme | AABBACCA DDEEDFFD GGHHCAAG IIJJIFFI KKLLJMMK AANNAFFA |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 111011101110111 00111101011111 10101110 10101010 001100101110101 10101011 11101011 01110111010101 110110100010101 101011111110101 1101010 1111010 111010110011101 0111110 11111010 001010111111111 11010100011011 110101010110101 10101110 10101010 110101111101010 1110101 10010111 10101010001101 11011101001010101 11111101110111 11111010 10101010 011111101110101 11101010 10101010 111010100011111 11110100111101 110110101010101 1010101 1010101 01110110110101 1110100 1111111 1111101110101 11011100110101 1101110001011 1011101 0110101 0110111011110001 111110 1110110 11101110001 |
Closest metre | Iambic hexameter |
Characters | 2,207 |
Words | 409 |
Sentences | 12 |
Stanzas | 6 |
Stanza Lengths | 8, 8, 8, 8, 8, 8 |
Lines Amount | 48 |
Letters per line (avg) | 36 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 291 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 68 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 2:02 min read
- 71 Views
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"Eland’s River" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 26 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/14959/eland%E2%80%99s-river>.
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