Confetti In The Wind



He wrote a letter in his mind
          To answer one a maid had sent;
He sought the fitting word to find,
          As on by hill and rill he went.
By bluebell wood and hawthorn lane,
          The cadence sweet and silken phrase
He incubated in his brain
                    For days and days.

He wrote his letter on a page
          Of paper with a satin grain;
It did not ring, so in a rage
          He tore it up and tried again.
Time after time he drafted it;
          He polished it all through the night;
He tuned and pruned till bit by bit
                    He got it right.

He took his letter to the post,
          Yet long he held it in his hand.
Strangely his mood had veered, almost
          Reversed,--he could not understand.
The girl was vague, the words were vain;
          April romance had come to grief . . .
He tore his letter up again,--
                    Oh blest relief!

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

46 sec read
137

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABABCDCD ECEFGHGH IJIJCKFK
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 888
Words 155
Stanzas 3
Stanza Lengths 8, 8, 8

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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