Analysis of Australian Scenery
Andrew Barton Paterson 1864 (Orange, New South Wales) – 1941 (Sydney, New South Wales)
The Mountains
A land of sombre, silent hills, where mountain cattle go
By twisted tracks, on sidelings deep, where giant gum trees grow
And the wind replies, in the river oaks, to the song of the stream below.
A land where the hills keep watch and ward, silent and wide awake
As those who sit by a dead campfire, and wait for the dawn to break,
Or those who watched by the Holy Cross for the dead Redeemer's sake.
A land where silence lies so deep that sound itself is dead
And a gaunt grey bird, like a homeless soul, drifts, noiseless, overhead
And the world's great story is left untold, and the message is left unsaid.
The Plains
A land as far as the eye can see, where the waving grasses grow
Or the plains are blackened and burnt and bare, where the false mirages go
Like shifting symbols of hope deferred -- land where you never know.
Land of plenty or land of want, where the grey Companions dance,
Feast or famine, or hope or fear, and in all things land of chance,
Where Nature pampers or Nature slays, in her ruthless, red, romance.
And we catch a sound of a fairy's song, as the wind goes whipping by,
Or a scent like incense drifts along from the herbage ripe and dry
-- Or the dust storms dance on their ballroom floor, where the bones of the cattle lie.
Scheme | XAAABBB CCC XAAADDD EEE |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 010 0111101110101 1101111110111 001010010110110101 011011101100101 1111101100110111 11111010110111 01110111110111 001111010111101 001110110100101101 01 0111101111010101 10111001011010101 110101101111101 111011111010101 111011110011111 1101011010010101 0110110111011101 101101101101101 10111111110110101 |
Closest metre | Iambic heptameter |
Characters | 1,276 |
Words | 243 |
Sentences | 7 |
Stanzas | 4 |
Stanza Lengths | 7, 3, 7, 3 |
Lines Amount | 20 |
Letters per line (avg) | 49 |
Words per line (avg) | 12 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 247 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 60 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:13 min read
- 71 Views
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"Australian Scenery" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 29 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/2491/australian-scenery>.
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