Analysis of Skeleton Flat
Henry Lawson 1867 (Grenfell) – 1922 (Sydney)
HERE’S never a bough to be tossed in the breeze,
For it’s long since the forest was green;
And round all the trunks of the naked white trees
The marks of the death-ring are seen.
The solemn-faced bear, who had looked on the blacks
From his home with the ’possum and cat,
Blinked anxiously down when the death-dealing axe
Was ring-barking Skeleton Flat.
And, strange to be seen in the evergreen south,
The gums for ten summers have stood,
And dried in the terrible furnace of drouth,
Till harder than flint is the wood.
Now tall grows the grass at the roots of the trees,
But a beautiful forest it cost;
And the heart of the splitter is sad when he sees
And thinks of the timber that’s lost.
Here flies, through a sky that is glazed, the black crow,
And the eagle goes circling around,
Or evilly sits on a branch that is low,
With his gleaming black eye on the ground.
And loudly the jackasses chuckle in mirth,
When a comrade flies upward, until
Like a fragment of thread, in its height from the earth,
Is the writhing brown snake in his bill.
O fit for the place are the curlews that wail
On the banks of a distant lagoon,
Or round by the swamps that are shallow and pale
In the light of the nights of the moon;
When glist’ning and white are the frost-covered trees
That dead for ten summers have stood;
And the stranger, benighted, might fancy he sees
The skeleton wraith of a wood.
Scheme | ABABCDCD EFEFAXAX GHGHIJIJ KLKLAFAF |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 11001111001 111101011 01101101011 01101111 01011111101 111101001 11001101101 11101001 0111100101 01111011 01001001011 11011101 11101101101 101001011 00110111111 01101011 11101111011 0010110001 111101111 111011101 010011001 10111001 101011011101 101011011 1110110111 101101001 11101111001 001101101 1101101101 11111011 001001011011 01001101 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,371 |
Words | 262 |
Sentences | 8 |
Stanzas | 4 |
Stanza Lengths | 8, 8, 8, 8 |
Lines Amount | 32 |
Letters per line (avg) | 34 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 271 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 65 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on April 02, 2023
- 1:18 min read
- 56 Views
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"Skeleton Flat" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 3 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/17920/skeleton-flat>.
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