Analysis of Play The Game
Jessie Pope 1868 (Leicester) – 1941 (Devon)
Twenty-Two stalwarts in stripes and shorts
Kicking a ball along,
Set in a square of leather-lunged sports
Twenty-two thousand strong,
Some of them shabby, some of them spruce,
Savagely clamorous all,
Hurling endearments, advice or abuse,
At the muscular boys on the ball.
Stark and stiff 'neath a stranger's sky
A few hundred miles away,
War-worn, khaki-clad figures lie,
Their faces rigid and grey
Stagger and drop where the bullets swarm,
Where the shrapnel is bursting loud,
Die, to keep England safe and warm
For a vigorous football crowd !
Football's a sport, and a rare sport too,
Don't make it a source of shame.
To-day there are worthier things to do.
Englishmen, play the game!
A truce to the League, a truce to the Cup,
Get to work with a gun,
When our country's at war we must all back up
It's the only thing to be done!
Scheme | ABABCDCD EFEFGHGH IJIJKLKL |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Traditional rhyme |
Metre | 101100101 100101 100111011 101101 111101111 10011 10101101 101001101 10110101 0110101 11101101 1101001 100110101 10101101 11110101 1010011 10100111 1110111 1111100111 10101 0110101101 111101 110101111111 10101111 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 839 |
Words | 150 |
Sentences | 7 |
Stanzas | 3 |
Stanza Lengths | 8, 8, 8 |
Lines Amount | 24 |
Letters per line (avg) | 27 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 215 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 50 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 31, 2023
- 46 sec read
- 258 Views
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"Play The Game" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 28 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/43063/play-the-game>.
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