Analysis of May Miracle



On this festive first of May,
Wending wistfully my way
Three sad sights I saw today.

The first was such a lovely lad
He lit with grace the sordid street;
Yet in a monk's robe he was clad,
With tonsured head and sandalled feet.
Though handsome as a movie star
His eyes had holiness in them,
As if he saw afaint, afar
A stable-stall in Bethlehem.

The second was a crippled maid
Who gazed and gazed with eager glance
Into a window that displayed
The picture of a ballet dance.
And as she leaned on crutches twain,
Before that poster garland-gay
She looked so longingly and vain
I thought she'd never go away.

The last one was a sightless man
Who to the tune of a guitar
Caught coppers in a dingy can,
Patient and sad as blind men are.
So old and grey and grimy too,
His fingers fumbled on the strings,
As emptily he looked at you,
And sang as only sorrow sings.

Then I went home and had a dream
That seemed fantastical to me...
I saw the youth with eye agleam
Put off his robe and dance with glee.
The maid her crutches threw away;
Her withered limbs seemed shapely fine;
And there the two with radiance gay
Divinely danced in soft entwine:
While the blind man, his sight restored,
Guitared the Glory of the Lord.


Scheme AAA BCBCDEDE FGFGHAHA IDIDJKJK LMLMANANOO
Poetic Form
Metre 1110111 1010011 1111101 01110101 11110101 10011111 111011 11010101 11110001 1111101 0101010 01010101 11011101 01010101 01010011 01111101 01110101 11110001 11110101 0111011 11011001 11000101 10011111 11010101 11010101 111111 01110101 11110101 11111 11011101 11110111 01010101 01011101 010111001 01010101 10111101 1010101
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 1,182
Words 232
Sentences 11
Stanzas 5
Stanza Lengths 3, 8, 8, 8, 10
Lines Amount 37
Letters per line (avg) 26
Words per line (avg) 6
Letters per stanza (avg) 190
Words per stanza (avg) 46
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

1:10 min read
35

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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