Analysis of Barcelona



The night before I left Milan
A mob jammed the Cathedral Square,
And high the tide of passion ran
As politics befouled the air.
A seething hell of human strife,
I shrank back from its evil core,
Seeing in this convulsive life
The living seeds of war.

To Barcelona then I came,
And oh the heavenly release!
From conflict and consuming flame
I knew the preciousness of peace.
Such veneration for the law!
How decorous was every one!
And then (significant) I saw
Each copper packed a tommy gun.

Well, maybe it is best that way.
Peace can mean more than liberty:
These people, state-directed, may
Be happier than those more free.
When politics wield evil grip,
And warring factions rise and fall,
Benevolent dictatorship
May be the answer, after all.


Scheme XAXABCBC DEDEFGFG HIHIJKJK
Poetic Form
Metre 01011101 01100101 01011101 110101 01011101 11111101 10010101 010111 1010111 01010001 11000101 110111 1010101 110011001 01010011 11010101 11011111 11111100 11010101 11001111 1101101 01010101 0100010 11010101
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 731
Words 133
Sentences 11
Stanzas 3
Stanza Lengths 8, 8, 8
Lines Amount 24
Letters per line (avg) 25
Words per line (avg) 5
Letters per stanza (avg) 197
Words per stanza (avg) 44
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

39 sec read
87

Robert William Service

Robert William Service was a poet and writer sometimes referred to as the Bard of the Yukon He is best-known for his writings on the Canadian North including the poems The Shooting of Dan McGrew The Law of the Yukon and The Cremation of Sam McGee His writing was so expressive that his readers took him for a hard-bitten old Klondike prospector not the later-arriving bank clerk he actually was Robert William Service was born 16 January 1874 in Preston England but also lived in Scotland before emigrating to Canada in 1894 Service went to the Yukon Territory in 1904 as a bank clerk and became famous for his poems about this region which are mostly in his first two books of poetry He wrote quite a bit of prose as well and worked as a reporter for some time but those writings are not nearly as well known as his poems He travelled around the world quite a bit and narrowly escaped from France at the beginning of the Second World War during which time he lived in Hollywood California He died 11 September 1958 in France Incidentally he played himself in a movie called The Spoilers starring John Wayne and Marlene Dietrich more…

All Robert William Service poems | Robert William Service Books

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