Analysis of The Firetail's Nest

John Clare 1793 (Helpston) – 1864 (St Andrew's Hospital)



'Tweet' pipes the robin as the cat creeps by
Her nestling young that in the elderns lie,
And then the bluecap tootles in its glee,
Picking the flies from orchard apple tree,
And 'pink' the chaffinch cries its well-known strain,
Urging its kind to utter 'pink' again,
While in a quiet mood hedgesparrows try
An inward stir of shadowed melody.
Around the rotten tree the firetail mourns
As the old hedger to his toil returns,
Chopping the grain to stop the gap close by
The hole where her blue eggs in safety lie.
Of everything that stirs she dreameth wrong
And pipes her 'tweet tut' fears the whole day long.


Scheme AABBCDABEFAAGG
Poetic Form
Metre 1101010111 010110011 01011011 1001110101 010111111 1011110101 10010111 1101110100 010101011 1011011101 1001110111 0110110101 11011111 0101110111
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 602
Words 112
Sentences 4
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 14
Lines Amount 14
Letters per line (avg) 34
Words per line (avg) 8
Letters per stanza (avg) 480
Words per stanza (avg) 110
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 27, 2023

33 sec read
52

John Clare

John Clare was an English poet in his time he was commonly known as the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet more…

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