Analysis of Dyspeptic Clerk



I think I'll buy a little field,
Though scant am I of pelf,
And hold the hope that it may yield
A living for myself;
For I have toiled ten thousand days
With ledger and with pen,
And I am sick of city ways
And soured with city men.

So I will plant my little plot
With lettuce, beans and peas;
Potatoes too - oh quite a lot,
An pear and apple trees.
My carrots will be coral pink,
My turnips ivory;
And I'll forget my pen and ink,
And office slavery.

My hut shall have a single room
Monastically bare;
A faggot fire for the winter gloom,
A table and a chair.
A Frugalist I call myself,
My needs are oh so small;
My luxury a classic shelf
Of poets on the wall.

Here as I dream, how grey and cold
The City seems to me;
Another world of green and gold
Incessantly I see.
So I will fling my pen away,
And learn a how to wield;
A cashbook and a stool today . . .
Soon, soon a Little Field.


Scheme ABABCDCD EFEFGHGH IJIJBKBK LHLHMAMA
Poetic Form
Metre 11110101 111111 01011111 01011 11111101 110011 01111101 0101101 11111101 110101 01011101 110101 11011101 110100 01011101 010100 11110101 11 0101010101 010001 01111 111111 11000101 110101 11111101 010111 01011101 010011 11111101 010111 0100101 110101
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 860
Words 182
Sentences 11
Stanzas 4
Stanza Lengths 8, 8, 8, 8
Lines Amount 32
Letters per line (avg) 21
Words per line (avg) 6
Letters per stanza (avg) 167
Words per stanza (avg) 46
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 03, 2023

55 sec read
64

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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