Analysis of Old Poets
Joyce Kilmer 1886 (New Brunswick) – 1918 (Seringes-et-Nesles)
(For Robert Cortez Holliday)
If I should live in a forest
And sleep underneath a tree,
No grove of impudent saplings
Would make a home for me.
I'd go where the old oaks gather,
Serene and good and strong,
And they would not sigh and tremble
And vex me with a song.
The pleasantest sort of poet
Is the poet who's old and wise,
With an old white beard and wrinkles
About his kind old eyes.
For these young flippertigibbets
A-rhyming their hours away
They won't be still like honest men
And listen to what you say.
The young poet screams forever
About his sex and his soul;
But the old man listens, and smokes his pipe,
And polishes its bowl.
There should be a club for poets
Who have come to seventy year.
They should sit in a great hall drinking
Red wine and golden beer.
They would shuffle in of an evening,
Each one to his cushioned seat,
And there would be mellow talking
And silence rich and sweet.
There is no peace to be taken
With poets who are young,
For they worry about the wars to be fought
And the songs that must be sung.
But the old man knows that he's in his chair
And that God's on His throne in the sky.
So he sits by the fire in comfort
And he lets the world spin by.
Scheme | A XBCB DEXE XFXF CAXA DGXG XHIH IJIJ XKXK XLXL |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 1100110 11110010 010101 111110 110111 11101110 010101 01111010 011101 011110 10101101 11111010 011111 1111 01011001 11111101 0101111 01101010 0111011 1011100111 0111 11101110 11111001 111001110 110101 111001110 1111101 01111010 010101 11111110 110111 11100101111 0011111 1011111011 011111001 1111010010 0110111 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,183 |
Words | 235 |
Sentences | 12 |
Stanzas | 10 |
Stanza Lengths | 1, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4 |
Lines Amount | 37 |
Letters per line (avg) | 25 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 92 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 23 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:12 min read
- 95 Views
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