Young Mother



Her baby was so full of glee,
          And through the day
It laughed and babbled on her knee
          In happy play.
It pulled her hair all out of curl
          With noisy joy;
So peppy she was glad her girl
          Was not a boy.

Then as she longed for it to sleep,
          To her surprise
It just relaxed within her keep
          With closing eyes.
And as it lay upon her breast
          So still its breath,
So exquisite its utter rest
          It looked like death.

It seemed like it had slipped away
          To shadow land;
With tiny face like tinted clay
          And waxen hand.
No ghost of sigh, no living look . . .
          Then with an ache
Of panic fear and love she shook
          Her babe awake.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 19, 2023

37 sec read
80

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABABCDCD EFEFGHGH BIBIJKJK
Closest metre Iambic trimeter
Characters 710
Words 125
Stanzas 3
Stanza Lengths 8, 8, 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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