Analysis of Reptiles And Roses



So crystal clear it is to me
That when I die I cease to be,
All else seems sheer stupidity.

All promises of Paradise
Are wishful thinking, preacher's lies,
Dogmatic dust flung in our eyes.

Yea, life's immortal, swift it flows
Alike in reptile and in rose,
But as it comes, so too it goes.

Dead roses will not bloom again;
The lifeless lizard writhes in vain;
Cups shattered will not hold champagne.

Our breath is brief, and being so
Let's make our heaven here below,
And lavish kindness as we go.

For when dour Death shall close the door
There will be darkness evermore;
So let us kneel in prayer before

Each day and let our duty be
To fight that mankind may be free . . .
There is our Immortality.


Scheme AAA XBB CCC XDD EEE FFF AAA
Poetic Form
Metre 11011111 11111111 11110100 1100110 11010101 010110101 11010111 01010001 11111111 11011101 01010101 11011101 101110101 111010101 01010111 111011101 1111010 11110101 110110101 11111111 11100100
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 686
Words 132
Sentences 10
Stanzas 7
Stanza Lengths 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3
Lines Amount 21
Letters per line (avg) 26
Words per line (avg) 6
Letters per stanza (avg) 77
Words per stanza (avg) 19
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 14, 2023

40 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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