Analysis of Toads
Philip Larkin 1922 (Coventry) – 1985 (Hull)
Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?
Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison —
Just for paying a few bills!
That’s out of proportion.
Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losels, loblolly-men, louts —
They don’t end as paupers;
Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines —
they seem to like it.
Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets — and yet
No one actually starves.
Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff
That dreams are made on:
For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,
And will never allow me to blarney
My way of getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.
I don’t say, one bodies the other
One’s spiritual truth;
But I do say it’s hard to lose either,
When you have both.
Scheme | XXXX ABXB XAXX XXXX XXXA CBCX XXXX BDXD EXEX |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Quatrain (33%) |
Metre | 1111011 1111 11111101 01011 1110111 1110010 1110011 111010 1111111 1001 11011 111110 111111 1100010 110101 11111 111111 101001 1101101 111001 10101001 111110 111111101 11111 110010011 1011 11110111 0111 011001111 11110 010010010 11110 111110010 110001 1111111110 1111 |
Closest metre | Iambic trimeter |
Characters | 1,011 |
Words | 195 |
Sentences | 9 |
Stanzas | 9 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4 |
Lines Amount | 36 |
Letters per line (avg) | 22 |
Words per line (avg) | 5 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 87 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 22 |
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"Toads" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 29 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/58800/toads>.
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