Analysis of The Hearth-Stone



The leaves are sick and jaundiced, they
              Drift down the air;
December's sky is sodden grey,
              Dark with despair;
A bleary dawn will light anon
              A world of care.

My name is cut into a stone,
              No care have I;
The letters drool, as I alone
              Forgotten lie:
With weed my grave is overgrown,
              None cometh nigh.

A hundred hollow years will speed
              As I decay;
And I'll be comrade to the weed,
              Kin to the clay;
Until some hind in homing-need
              Will pass my way.

Until some lover seeking hearth
              With joy will see
My nameless stone sunk in the earth
              And it will be
The ruddy birth of childish mirth,
              And elder glee.

And none will dream it bore my name
              Decades ago;
A scribbling fool of little fame,
              Who loved life so . . .
Well, flesh is grass and Time must pass,--
              Heigh ho! Heigh ho!


Scheme ABABCB CDCDCD EAEAEA XFGFGF HIHIXI
Poetic Form Tetractys  (40%)
Etheree  (30%)
Metre 01110101 1101 01011101 1101 0101111 0111 11110101 1111 01011101 0101 1111101 1101 01010111 1101 0111101 1101 01110101 1111 01110101 1111 11011001 0111 01011101 0101 01111111 0101 010011101 1111 11110111 1111
Closest metre Iambic trimeter
Characters 967
Words 150
Sentences 10
Stanzas 5
Stanza Lengths 6, 6, 6, 6, 6
Lines Amount 30
Letters per line (avg) 19
Words per line (avg) 5
Letters per stanza (avg) 117
Words per stanza (avg) 30
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

45 sec read
122

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…

All Robert William Service poems | Robert William Service Books

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