Analysis of Old Boy Scout



A bonny bird I found today
Mired in a melt of tar;
Its silky breast was silver-grey,
Its wings were cinnabar.
So still it lay right in the way
Of every passing car.

Yet as I gently sought to pry
It loose, it glared at me;
You would have thought its foe was I,
It pecked so viciously;
So fiercely fought, as soft I sought
From death to set it free.

Its pinions pitifully frail
I wrested from the muck;
I feared the feathers of its tail
Would never come unstuck.
. . . The jewel-bright it flashed in flight -
Oh how I wished it luck!

With happiness my heart was light,
To  see how fair it flew;
To do my good deed I delight,
As grey-haired scouts should do;
Yet oh my bright reward's to write
This simple rhyme for you!


Scheme ABABAB CDCDXD EFEFGF GHGHGH
Poetic Form
Metre 01011101 100111 11011101 11010 11111001 1100101 11110111 111111 11111111 111100 11011111 111111 1110001 110101 11010111 110101 01011101 111111 11001111 111111 11111101 111111 1111111 110111
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 702
Words 142
Sentences 10
Stanzas 4
Stanza Lengths 6, 6, 6, 6
Lines Amount 24
Letters per line (avg) 23
Words per line (avg) 6
Letters per stanza (avg) 137
Words per stanza (avg) 36
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

42 sec read
108

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…

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