Analysis of An Epicure

Robert William Service 1874 – 1958



Should you preserve white mice in honey
Don't use imported ones from China,
For though they cost you less in money
You'll find the Japanese ones finer.
But if Chinese, stuff them with spice,
Which certainly improves their savour,
And though the Canton mice are nice,
The Pekinese have finer flavour.

If you should pickle bracken shoots
The way the wily Japanese do,
Be sure to pluck then young - what suits
Our Eastern taste may fail to please you.
And as for nettles, cook them well;
To eat them raw may give you skin-itch;
But if you boil them for a spell
They taste almost as good as spinach.

So Reader, if you chance to be
Of Oriental food a lover,
And care to share a meal with me,
I'll add the addled eggs of plover;
And gaily I will welcome you
To lunch within an arbour sunny,
On nettle broth and bracken stew.
And nice white mice, conserved in honey.


Scheme AXABCBCB DEDEFXFX ABABEAEA
Poetic Form
Metre 110111010 110101110 111111010 11001110 11011111 11000111 01010111 011101 11110101 01010011 11111111 1010111111 01110111 111111111 11111101 11111110 11011111 10101010 01110111 110101110 01011101 110111010 11010101 011101010
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 844
Words 164
Sentences 7
Stanzas 3
Stanza Lengths 8, 8, 8
Lines Amount 24
Letters per line (avg) 28
Words per line (avg) 7
Letters per stanza (avg) 224
Words per stanza (avg) 54
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on May 01, 2023

50 sec read
59

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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