Analysis of At The Parade

Robert William Service 1874 – 1958



I cannot flap a flag
          Or beat a drum;
Behind the mob I lag
          With larynx dumb;
Alas! I fear I'm not
          A Patriot.

With acrid eyes I see
          The soul of things;
And equal unto me
          Are cooks and kings;
I would not cross the street
          A duke to meet.

Oh curse me for a fool
          To be so proud;
To stand so still and cool
          Amid the crowd.
For President or Peer
          God, let me cheer!

But no, despite the glee
          My heart is cold;
I think that it may be
          Because I'm old;
I'm dumb where millions yell . . .
          Oh what the hell!


Scheme ABABXX CDCDEE FGFGHH CICIJJ
Poetic Form
Metre 110101 1101 010111 1101 011111 0100 110111 0111 010101 1101 111101 0111 111101 1111 111101 0101 11011 1111 110101 1111 111111 0111 111101 1101
Closest metre Iambic trimeter
Characters 597
Words 107
Sentences 10
Stanzas 4
Stanza Lengths 6, 6, 6, 6
Lines Amount 24
Letters per line (avg) 15
Words per line (avg) 5
Letters per stanza (avg) 91
Words per stanza (avg) 27
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

33 sec read
39

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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