Analysis of Bed Sitter



He stared at me with sad, hurt eyes,
That drab, untidy man;
And though my clients I despise
I do the best I can
To comfort them with cheerful chat;
(Quite comme il faut, of course)
And furnish evidence so that
Their wives may claim divorce.

But as this chap sobbed out his woes
I thought: How it's a shame!
His wife's a bitch and so he goes
And takes himself the blame.
And me behaving like a heel
To earn a filthy fee . . .
Said I: "You've had a dirty deal."
"What of yourself? said he.

And so I told him how I was
A widow of the war,
And doing what I did because
Two sons I struggled for.
As I sat knitting through the night
He eyed me from the bed,
And in the rosy morning light
Impulsively he said:

"Through in this sordid game we play,
To cheat the law we plan,
i do believe you when you say
You hold aloof from man;
Unto the dead you have been true,
And on the day I'm free,
To prove how I have faith in you -
Please, will you marry me?"

That's how it was. Now we are wed,
And life's a list of joys.
The old unhappy past is dead;
He's father to my boys.
And I have told him just to-day,
(Though forty, I confess,)
A little sister's on the way
To crown our happiness.


Scheme ABABCDCD EFEFGHGH XIXIJKJK LBLBMHMH KNKNLXLX
Poetic Form Etheree  (28%)
Tetractys  (23%)
Metre 11111111 110101 01110101 110111 11011101 111111 01010011 111101 11111111 111101 11010111 010101 01010101 110101 11110101 110111 01111111 010101 01011101 111101 11110101 111101 00010101 010011 10110111 110111 11011111 110111 10011111 010111 11111101 111101 11111111 010111 01010111 110111 01111111 110101 01010101 1110100
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 1,145
Words 245
Sentences 16
Stanzas 5
Stanza Lengths 8, 8, 8, 8, 8
Lines Amount 40
Letters per line (avg) 22
Words per line (avg) 6
Letters per stanza (avg) 175
Words per stanza (avg) 49
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

1:15 min read
121

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…

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