Analysis of The Tunnel



Toil's a tunnel, there's no way out
For fellows, the like o' me;
A beggar wi' only a crust an' a clout
At the worst o' the worst is free;
but I work to eat, an' I eat to work;
It's always the same old round,
And I dassent fail for the day I shirk
They'll shovel me underground.

I guess God meant it to be that way,
For a man must make his bread;
I was born to bondage, to earn my pay,
To slave to the day I'm dead;
To live in a tunnel, to die in a ditch -
That's just what us fellows do;
For the poor must be makin' the rich more rich,
An' the many must serve the few.

Aye, we live in a tunnel, most o' us,
A-fearin' to lose our job;
But who has the right to gripe an' cuss
So the goblet's hot on the hob.
An' I mustn't be havin' the wife complain,
An' I can't let the childer fast:
So I'll toil in my tunnel an' drag my chain,
Clank! Clank! Clank! to the last.


Scheme ABABCDCD EFEFGHGH IJIJKLKL
Poetic Form Traditional rhyme
Metre 10101111 1100111 01011001101 10110111 1111111111 110111 011110111 110110 111111111 1011111 1111101111 1110111 11001011001 1111101 10111100111 10101101 1110010111 0111101 111011111 1011101 1110110101 1111011 11101101111 111101
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 846
Words 188
Sentences 8
Stanzas 3
Stanza Lengths 8, 8, 8
Lines Amount 24
Letters per line (avg) 26
Words per line (avg) 8
Letters per stanza (avg) 207
Words per stanza (avg) 62
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

59 sec read
88

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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