Analysis of Blue-Blood

James Stephens 1882 (Dublin) – 1950



We thought at first, this man is a king for sure,
Or the branch of a mighty and ancient and famous lineage—
That silly, sulky, illiterate, black-avised boor
Who was hatched by foreign vulgarity under a hedge.

The good men of Clare were drinking his health in a flood,
And gazing with me in awe at the princely lad,
And asking each other from what bluest blueness of blood
His daddy was squeezed, and the pa and the da of his dad ?

We waited there, gaping and wondering, anxiously,
Until he'd stop eating and let the glad tidings out,
And the slack-jawed booby proved to the hilt that he
Was lout, son of lout, by old lout, and was da to a lout !


Scheme AXAX BCBC DEDE
Poetic Form Quatrain  (67%)
Metre 11111110111 1011010010010100 11010100111 11111001001001 0111101011001 010110110101 01011011101011 11011001001111 1101100100100 0111100101101 001110110111 11111111011101
Closest metre Iambic heptameter
Characters 644
Words 125
Sentences 4
Stanzas 3
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4
Lines Amount 12
Letters per line (avg) 42
Words per line (avg) 10
Letters per stanza (avg) 166
Words per stanza (avg) 42
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

37 sec read
79

James Stephens

James Stephens was an Irish Republican and the founding member of an originally unnamed revolutionary organisation in Dublin on 17 March 1858, later to become known as the Irish Republican Brotherhood, also referred to as the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood by contemporaries. more…

All James Stephens poems | James Stephens Books

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