Analysis of My Cuckoo Clock



I bought a cuckoo clock
         And glad was I
To hear its tick and tock,
         Its dulcet cry.
But Jones, whose wife is young
         And pretty too,
Winced when that bird gave tongue:
         Cuckoo! Cuckoo!

I have a lady friend
         Whom I would wed,
For dalliance should end
         In bridal bed.
Until the thought occurred:
         Can she be true?
And then I heard that bird:
         Cuckoo! Cuckoo!

Though ignorance is bliss
         And love be blind,
Faithless may be the kiss
         Of womankind.
So now sweet echoes mock
         My wish to woo:
Confound that cursed clock!
         Cuckoo! Cuckoo!


Scheme ababcdcD efefgdgD hxhdadaD
Poetic Form
Metre 11011 0111 111101 1101 111111 0101 111111 11 110101 1111 110011 0101 010101 1111 011111 11 110011 0111 11101 11 111101 1111 01111 11
Closest metre Iambic trimeter
Characters 619
Words 99
Sentences 12
Stanzas 3
Stanza Lengths 8, 8, 8
Lines Amount 24
Letters per line (avg) 17
Words per line (avg) 4
Letters per stanza (avg) 134
Words per stanza (avg) 32
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

29 sec read
54

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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