Analysis of Do They Know?
Andrew Barton Paterson 1864 (Orange, New South Wales) – 1941 (Sydney, New South Wales)
Do they know? At the turn to the straight
Where the favourites fail,
And every last atom of weight
Is telling its tale;
As some grim old stayer hard-pressed
Runs true to his breed,
And with head in front of the rest
Fights on in the lead;
When the jockeys are out with the whips,
With a furlong to go,
And the backers grow white in the lips --
Do you think they don't know?
Do they know? As they come back to weigh
In a whirlwind of cheers,
Though the spurs have left marks of the fray,
Though the sweat on the ears
Gathers cold, and they sob with distress
As they roll up the track,
They know just as well their success
As the man on their back.
As they walk through a dense human lane
That sways to and fro,
And cheers them again and again,
Do you think they don't know?
Scheme | ababcdcefgfGhihijkjklgmG |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 111101101 1011 010011011 11011 11111011 11111 01101101 11001 101011101 10111 001011001 111111 111111111 00111 101111101 101101 101011101 111101 11111101 101111 111101101 11101 01101001 111111 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 780 |
Words | 157 |
Sentences | 6 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 24 |
Lines Amount | 24 |
Letters per line (avg) | 25 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 596 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 155 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on April 13, 2023
- 47 sec read
- 43 Views
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"Do They Know?" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 16 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/2515/do-they-know%3F>.
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