Analysis of On A Pen
Jonathan Swift 1667 (Dublin) – 1745 (Ireland)
In youth exalted high in air,
Or bathing in the waters fair,
Nature to form me took delight,
And clad my body all in white.
My person tall, and slender waist,
On either side with fringes graced;
Till me that tyrant man espied,
And dragg'd me from my mother's side:
No wonder now I look so thin;
The tyrant stript me to the skin:
My skin he flay'd, my hair he cropt:
At head and foot my body lopt:
And then, with heart more hard than stone,
He pick'd my marrow from the bone.
To vex me more, he took a freak
To slit my tongue and make me speak:
But, that which wonderful appears,
I speak to eyes, and not to ears.
He oft employs me in disguise,
And makes me tell a thousand lies:
To me he chiefly gives in trust
To please his malice or his lust.
From me no secret he can hide;
I see his vanity and pride:
And my delight is to expose
His follies to his greatest foes.
All languages I can command,
Yet not a word I understand.
Without my aid, the best divine
In learning would not know a line:
The lawyer must forget his pleading;
The scholar could not show his reading.
Nay; man my master is my slave;
I give command to kill or save,
Can grant ten thousand pounds a-year,
And make a beggar's brat a peer.
But, while I thus my life relate,
I only hasten on my fate.
My tongue is black, my mouth is furr'd,
I hardly now can force a word.
I die unpitied and forgot,
And on some dunghill left to rot.
Scheme | AABBCCBDEEBBFFGGHHIIJJDDKKLLMMNNOOPPQQBRSS |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 01010101 11000101 10111101 01110101 11010101 11011101 1111011 01111101 11011111 01011101 11111111 11011101 01111111 11110101 11111101 11110111 11110001 11110111 11011001 01110101 11110101 11110111 11110111 11110001 01011101 11011101 11001101 1101101 01110101 01011101 010101110 010111110 11110111 11011111 11110101 0101101 11111101 11010111 11111111 11011101 111001 0111111 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,361 |
Words | 281 |
Sentences | 12 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 42 |
Lines Amount | 42 |
Letters per line (avg) | 25 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 1,061 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 279 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:26 min read
- 93 Views
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"On A Pen" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 29 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/24288/on-a-pen>.
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