Analysis of Till The Wind Gets Right

Paul Laurence Dunbar 1872 (Dayton) – 1906



OH the breeze is blowin' balmy
And the sun is in a haze;
There's a cloud jest givin' coolness,
To the laziest of days.
There are crowds upon the lakeside,
But the fish refuse to bite,
So I'll wait and go a-fishin'
When the wind gets right.
Now my boat tugs at her anchor,
Eager now to kiss the spray,
While the little waves are callin'
Drowsy sailor come away,
There's a harbor for the happy,
And its sheen is just in sight,
But I won't set sail to get there,
Till the wind gets right.
That's my trouble, too, I reckon,
I've been waitin' all too long,
Tho' the days were always
Still the wind is always wrong.
An' when Gabriel blows his trumpet,
In the day o' in the night,
I will still be found waitin',
Till the wind gets right.


Scheme abcbdefeghfhaeiEfjbjkefE
Poetic Form
Metre 1011110 0011001 1011110 1010011 1110101 1010111 1110101 10111 11111010 1011101 1010111 1010101 10101010 0111101 11111111 10111 11101110 111111 10101 101111 111001110 0011001 111111 10111
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 715
Words 145
Sentences 6
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 24
Lines Amount 24
Letters per line (avg) 23
Words per line (avg) 6
Letters per stanza (avg) 550
Words per stanza (avg) 143
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

45 sec read
82

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Paul Laurence Dunbar was a seminal American poet of the late 19th and early 20th centuries Dunbar gained national recognition for his 1896 Lyrics of a Lowly Life one poem in the collection being Ode to Ethiopia more…

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