Analysis of My Boss



My Boss keeps sporty girls, they say;
His belly's big with cheer.
He squanders in a single day
What I make in a year.
For I must toil with bloody sweat,
And body bent and scarred,
While my whole life-gain he could bet
Upon a single card.

By Boss is big and I am small;
I slave to keep him rich.
He'd look at me like scum and call
Me something of a bitch . . .
Ah no! he wouldn't use that phrase
To designate my mother:
Despite his high and mighty ways,
My Boss is my twin-brother.

Conceived were we in common joy
And born in common pain;
But while I was a brawny boy
My brother stole my brain.
As dumb was I as he was smart,
As blind as he could see;
And so it was, bang from the start
He got the best of me.

I'm one of many in his pay;
From him I draw my dough;
But he would fire me right away
If he should hap to know
A week ago he passed me by;
I heard his wheezing breath,
And in his pouched and blood-shot eye
I saw, stark-staring - Death.

He has his women, cards and wine;
I have my beans and bread.
But oh, the last laugh will be mine
The day I hear he's dead.
Aye, though we shared a common womb
(I gloat to think of it)
Some day I'll stand beside his tomb
And loose my glob and . . . spit.


Scheme ABABCDCD EFEFGHGH IJIJKLKL AMAMNONO PQPQRSRS
Poetic Form Etheree  (30%)
Metre 11110111 11111 11000101 111001 11111101 010101 11111111 010101 11110111 111111 11111101 110101 11110111 110110 01110101 1111110 01010101 010101 11110101 110111 11111111 111111 01111101 110111 11110011 111111 111101101 111111 01011111 111101 00110111 111101 11110101 111101 11011111 011111 11110101 111111 11110111 011101
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 1,167
Words 252
Sentences 19
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) 178
Words per stanza (avg) 51
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 14, 2023

1:17 min read
148

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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