Analysis of The Lung Fish
Andrew Barton Paterson 1864 (Orange, New South Wales) – 1941 (Sydney, New South Wales)
The Honorable Ardleigh Wyse
Was every fisherman's despair;
He caught his fish on floating flies,
In fact he caught them in the air,
And wet-fly men -- good sports, perhaps --
He called "those chuck-and-chance-it chaps".
And then the Fates that sometimes play
A joke on such as me and you
Deported him up Queensland way
To act as a station jackaroo.
The boundary rider said, said he,
"You fish dry fly? Well, so do we.
"These barramundi are the blokes
To give you all the sport you need:
For when the big lagoons and soaks
Are dried right down to mud and weed
They don't sit there and raise a roar,
They pack their traps and come ashore.
"And all these rods and reels you lump
Along the creek from day to day
Would only give a man the hump
Who does his fishing Queensland way.
For when the barramundi's thick
We knock 'em over with a stick.
"The black boys on the Darwin side
Will fill a creek with bitter leaves
And when the fish are stupefied
The gins will gather 'em in sheaves.
Now tell me, could a feller wish
A finer way of catchin' fish?"
The stokehold of the steamship Foam
Contains our hero, very sick,
A-working of his passage home
And brandishing a blue gum stick.
"Behold," says he, "the latest fly;
It's called the Great Australian Dry."
Scheme | ABABCCDXDBEE FGFGHH IDIDJJ XKGKLL MJMJNN |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 0100011 110010001 11111101 01111001 01111101 11110111 01011011 01111101 0101111 1110101 010010111 11111111 11101 11110111 11010101 11111101 11110101 11110101 01110111 01011111 11010101 1111011 11011 11110101 01110101 11011101 010111 01110101 11110101 0101111 011011 011010101 01011101 01000111 01110101 11010101 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,257 |
Words | 238 |
Sentences | 12 |
Stanzas | 5 |
Stanza Lengths | 12, 6, 6, 6, 6 |
Lines Amount | 36 |
Letters per line (avg) | 27 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 193 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 47 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:11 min read
- 71 Views
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"The Lung Fish" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 21 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/2658/the-lung-fish>.
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