Analysis of Adventure



Out of the wood my White Knight came:
His eyes were bright with a bitter flame,
As I clung to his stirrup leather;
For I was only a dreaming lad,
Yet oh, what a wonderful faith I had!
And the song in my heart was never so glad,
As we took to the trail together.

"Friends and lovers, good-bye," I said;
Never once did I turn my head,
Though wickedly wild the weather
min were the rover's rags and scars,
And the rover's bed beneath the stars,
But never the shadow of prison bars,
As we ranged the world together.

Dreary and darkling was the trail,
But my Knight was clad in a gleaming mail,
And he plucked from his plume a feather.
And oh how foolishly proud was I!
"I'll wear it," I told him, "till I die;
Freemen we'll be of sea and sky,
To the ends of the earth together."

Yet now I know by my failing breath
I'm ripe for the last adventure, Death,
And I've reached the end of my tether:
But my Knight of the shining mail is there,
And his eyes are bright and he bids me dare:
So into the Dark let's boldly fare,
Into the Dark . . . together.


Scheme AABCCCB DDBEEEB FFBGGGB HHBIIIB
Poetic Form Burns stanza  (68%)
Metre 11011111 110110101 111111010 111100101 1110100111 00101111011 111101010 10101111 10111111 11001010 10010101 001010101 110011101 11101010 1001101 1111100101 011111010 011100111 111111111 10111101 101101010 111111101 111010101 011011110 1111010111 0111101111 101011101 0101010
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 1,025
Words 211
Sentences 11
Stanzas 4
Stanza Lengths 7, 7, 7, 7
Lines Amount 28
Letters per line (avg) 28
Words per line (avg) 7
Letters per stanza (avg) 197
Words per stanza (avg) 52
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 04, 2023

1:04 min read
238

Robert William Service

Robert William Service was a poet and writer sometimes referred to as the Bard of the Yukon He is best-known for his writings on the Canadian North including the poems The Shooting of Dan McGrew The Law of the Yukon and The Cremation of Sam McGee His writing was so expressive that his readers took him for a hard-bitten old Klondike prospector not the later-arriving bank clerk he actually was Robert William Service was born 16 January 1874 in Preston England but also lived in Scotland before emigrating to Canada in 1894 Service went to the Yukon Territory in 1904 as a bank clerk and became famous for his poems about this region which are mostly in his first two books of poetry He wrote quite a bit of prose as well and worked as a reporter for some time but those writings are not nearly as well known as his poems He travelled around the world quite a bit and narrowly escaped from France at the beginning of the Second World War during which time he lived in Hollywood California He died 11 September 1958 in France Incidentally he played himself in a movie called The Spoilers starring John Wayne and Marlene Dietrich more…

All Robert William Service poems | Robert William Service Books

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