Analysis of When the Ladies Come to the Shearing Shed
Henry Lawson 1867 (Grenfell) – 1922 (Sydney)
‘The ladies are coming,’ the super says
To the shearers sweltering there,
And ‘the ladies’ means in the shearing shed:
‘Don’t cut ’em too bad. Don’t swear.’
The ghost of a pause in the shed’s rough heart,
And lower is bowed each head;
And nothing is heard, save a whispered word,
And the roar of the shearing-shed.
The tall, shy rouser has lost his wits,
And his limbs are all astray;
He leaves a fleece on the shearing-board,
And his broom in the shearer’s way.
There’s a curse in store for that jackaroo
As down by the wall he slants—
And the ringer bends with his legs askew
And wishes he’d ‘patched them pants.’
They are girls from the city. (Our hearts rebel
As we squint at their dainty feet.)
And they gush and say in a girly way
That ‘the dear little lambs’ are ‘sweet.’
And Bill, the ringer, who’d scorn the use
Of a childish word like ‘damn,’
Would give a pound that his tongue were loose
As he tackles a lively lamb.
Swift thoughts of homes in the coastal towns—
Or rivers and waving grass—
And a weight on our hearts that we cannot define
That comes as the ladies pass.
But the rouser ventures a nervous dig
In the ribs of the next to him;
And Barcoo says to his pen-mate: ‘Twig
‘The style of the last un, Jim.’
Jim Moonlight gives her a careless glance—
Then he catches his breath with pain—
His strong hand shakes and the sunlights dance
As he bends to his work again.
But he’s well disguised in a bristling beard,
Bronzed skin, and his shearer’s dress;
And whatever Jim Moonlight hoped or feared
Were hard for his mates to guess.
Jim Moonlight, wiping his broad, white brow,
Explains, with a doleful smile:
‘A stitch in the side,’ and ‘he’s all right now’—
But he leans on the beam awhile,
And gazes out in the blazing noon
On the clearing, brown and bare—
She has come and gone, like a breath of June,
In December’s heat and glare.
The bushmen are big rough boys at the best,
With hearts of a larger growth;
But they hide those hearts with a brutal jest,
And the pain with a reckless oath.
Though the Bills and Jims of the bush-bard sing
Of their life loves, lost or dead,
The love of a girl is a sacred thing
Not voiced in a shearing-shed.
Scheme | ABCBXCXC XDXDBAXX XEDEFGFG XHXHIJIJ KXKXLMLM NONOPBPB QRQRSCSC |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 0101100101 1011001 0010100101 1111111 0110100111 0101111 0101110101 00110101 011101111 0111101 110110101 0110011 10101111 1110111 0010111101 0101111 111101010110 11111101 011010011 10110111 010101101 1010111 110111101 11100101 111100101 1100101 0011101111001 1110101 1010100101 00110111 01111111 0110111 11100101 11101111 11110011 11111101 11101001001 110111 01011111 0111111 11101111 0110101 0100101111 11110101 010100101 1010101 1110110111 01101 0101111101 1110101 1111110101 00110101 1010110111 1111111 0110110101 1100101 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 2,189 |
Words | 418 |
Sentences | 17 |
Stanzas | 7 |
Stanza Lengths | 8, 8, 8, 8, 8, 8, 8 |
Lines Amount | 56 |
Letters per line (avg) | 29 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 236 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 58 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 22, 2023
- 2:05 min read
- 136 Views
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"When the Ladies Come to the Shearing Shed" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 7 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/18183/when-the-ladies-come-to-the-shearing-shed>.
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