Analysis of The Retrospective Bird
Ambrose Bierce 1842 (Meigs County) – 1914 (Chihuahua)
His caw is a cackle, his eye is dim,
And he mopes all day on the lowest limb;
Not a word says he, but he snaps his bill
And twitches his palsied head, as a quill,
The ultimate plume of his pride and hope,
Quits his now featherless nose-of-the-Pope,
Leaving that eminence brown and bare
Exposed to the Prince of the Power of the Air.
And he sits and he thinks: 'I'm an old, old man,
Mateless and chickless, the last of my clan,
But I'd give the half of the days gone by
To perch once more on the branches high,
And hear my great-grand-daddy's comical croaks
In authorized versions of _Bulletin_ jokes.'
Scheme | AABBCCDDEEFFGG |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 1110101111 0111110101 1011111111 010111101 0100111101 1111001101 101100101 011011010101 01101111111 10101111 1110110111 111110101 01111101001 01010111 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 596 |
Words | 117 |
Sentences | 3 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 14 |
Lines Amount | 14 |
Letters per line (avg) | 33 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 462 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 114 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 35 sec read
- 119 Views
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"The Retrospective Bird" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 29 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/1965/the-retrospective-bird>.
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