Duello



A Frenchman and an Englishman
Resolved to fight a duel,
And hit upon a savage plan,
Because their hate was cruel.
They each would fire a single shot
In room of darkness pitchy,
And who was killed and who was not
Would hang on fingers twitchy.

The room was bare and dark as death,
And each ferocious fighter
Could hear his fierce opponent's breath
And clutched his pistol tighter.
The Gaston fired - the bullet hissed
On its destructive mission . . .
"Thank God!" said John Bull. "He has missed."
The Frenchman cried: "Perdition!"

Then silence followed like a spell,
And as the Briton sought to
Reply he wondered where the hell
His Gallic foe had got to.

And then he thought: "I'll mercy show,
Since Hades is a dire place
To send a fellow to - and so
I'll blase up through the fireplace."

So up the chimney he let fly,
Of grace a gallant henchman;
When lo! a sudden cry,
And down there crashed the Frenchman . . .
But if this yard in France you tell,
Although its vein be skittish,
I think it might be just as well
To make your Frenchman - British.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 19, 2023

59 sec read
152

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABCBDEDE FGFGHAHA IJIJ EKXK LALCIEIE
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 1,024
Words 199
Stanzas 5
Stanza Lengths 8, 8, 4, 4, 8

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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