Analysis of The Dauber



In stilly grove beside the sea
He mingles colours, measures space;
A bronze and breezy man is he,
        Yet peace is in his face.
Behold him stand and longly stare,
Till deft of hand and deep of eye
He captures on a canvas square
        The joy of earth and sky.

Aloof from servitude and strife,
From carking care and greed apart,
Beneath the blue he lives his life
        Of Nature and of Art.
He grieves his pictures must be sold,
Aye, even when his funds are low,
And fat men pay a purse of gold
        He sighs to see them go.

My loving toil is of the pen,
Yet while my verse is not unread,
His pictures will be living when
        My tropes are dim and dead.
God gives us talents great and small,
And though my rhymes I'll never rue,
Sometimes I wish that after all
        I were a dauber too.


Scheme ABABCDCD EFEFGHGH IJIJKLKL
Poetic Form Traditional rhyme
Metre 0110101 1101101 01010111 111011 0111011 11110111 11010101 011101 0111001 1110101 01011111 110011 11110111 11011111 01110111 111111 11011101 11111101 11011101 111101 11110101 01111101 01111101 100101
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 797
Words 154
Sentences 7
Stanzas 3
Stanza Lengths 8, 8, 8
Lines Amount 24
Letters per line (avg) 24
Words per line (avg) 6
Letters per stanza (avg) 195
Words per stanza (avg) 51
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

46 sec read
77

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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