Analysis of The Bonny Port of Sydney

Henry Lawson 1867 (Grenfell) – 1922 (Sydney)



The lovely Port of Sydney
Lies laughing to the sky,
The bonny Port of Sydney,
Where the ships of nations lie.
You shall never see such beauty,
Though you sail the wide world o’er,
As the sunny Port of Sydney,
As we see it from the Shore.
The shades of night are falling
On many ports of call,
But the harbour lights of Sydney
Are the grandest of them all;
Such a city set in jewels
Has ne’er been seen before
As the harbour lights of Sydney
As we see them from the Shore.

I must sail for gloomy London,
Where there are no harbour lights,
Where no sun is seen in winter,
And there are no starry nights;
And the bonny port of Sydney—
I may never see it more,
But I’ll always dream about it
As we view it from North Shore.


Scheme ABABACACXDADXCAC XECEACXC
Poetic Form
Metre 0101110 110101 0101110 1011101 11101110 1110111 10101110 1111101 0111110 110111 10101110 1010111 10101010 111101 10101110 1111101 11111010 1111101 11111010 0111101 00101110 1110111 1111011 1111111
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 714
Words 146
Sentences 5
Stanzas 2
Stanza Lengths 16, 8
Lines Amount 24
Letters per line (avg) 23
Words per line (avg) 6
Letters per stanza (avg) 278
Words per stanza (avg) 72
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

43 sec read
42

Henry Lawson

Henry Lawson 17 June 1867 - 2 September 1922 was an Australian writer and poet Along with his contemporary Banjo Paterson Lawson is among the best-known Australian poets and fiction writers of the colonial period more…

All Henry Lawson poems | Henry Lawson Books

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