Analysis of My Neighbors



To rest my fagged brain now and then,
When wearied of my proper labors,
I lay aside my lagging pen
And get to thinking on my neighbors;
For, oh, around my garret den
There's woe and poverty a-plenty,
And life's so interesting when
A lad is only two-and-twenty.

Now, there's that artist gaunt and wan,
A little card his door adorning;
It reads: "Je ne suis pour personne",
A very frank and fitting warning.
I fear he's in a sorry plight;
He starves, I think, too proud to borrow,
I hear him moaning every night:
Maybe they'll find him dead to-morrow.


Scheme ABABACAC XDADEFEF
Poetic Form
Metre 11111101 110111010 11011101 011101110 11011101 110100010 0111001 011101010 11110101 010111010 1111111 010101010 11100101 11111111 111101001 101111110
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 542
Words 103
Sentences 4
Stanzas 2
Stanza Lengths 8, 8
Lines Amount 16
Letters per line (avg) 26
Words per line (avg) 6
Letters per stanza (avg) 210
Words per stanza (avg) 51
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 19, 2023

32 sec 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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