Analysis of My Favourite Fan



Being a writer I receive
Sweet screeds from folk of every land;
Some are so weird you'd scarce believe,
And some quite hard to understand:
But as a conscientious man
I type my thanks to all I can.

So when I got a foreign scrawl
That spider-webbed across the page,
Said I: "This is the worst of all;
No doubt a child of tender age
Has written it, so I'll be kind,
And send an answer to her mind.

Promptly I typed a nice reply
And thought that it would be the end,
But in due course confused was I
To get a letter signed: Your Friend;
And with it, full of girlish grace,
A snapshot of a winsome face.

"I am afraid," she wrote to me,
"That you must have bees sure surprised
At my poor penmanship . . . You see,
My arms and legs are paralyzed:
With pen held in a sort of sheath
I do my writing with my teeth."

Though sadness followed my amaze,
And pity too, I must confess
The look that lit her laughing gaze
Was one of sunny happiness. . . .
Oh spirit of a heroine!
Your smile so tender, so divine,
I pray, may never cease to shine.


Scheme ABABCC DEDEFF GHGHII JKJKLL MXMXXNN
Poetic Form
Metre 10010101 111111001 11111101 0111101 1100101 11111111 11110101 11010101 11110111 11011101 11011111 01110101 10110101 01111101 10110111 11010111 01111101 0110101 11011111 11111101 111111 1101110 11100111 11110111 11010101 01011101 01110101 11110100 11010100 11110101 11110111
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 1,011
Words 206
Sentences 14
Stanzas 5
Stanza Lengths 6, 6, 6, 6, 7
Lines Amount 31
Letters per line (avg) 25
Words per line (avg) 7
Letters per stanza (avg) 156
Words per stanza (avg) 42
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

1:01 min read
63

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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