Analysis of The Blind And The Dead



She lay like a saint on her copper couch;
     Like an angel asleep she lay,
In the stare of the ghoulish folks that slouch
     Past the Dead and sneak away.

Then came old Jules of the sightless gaze,
     Who begged in the streets for bread.
Each day he had come for a year of days,
     And groped his way to the Dead.

"What's the Devil's Harvest to-day?" he cried;
     "A wanton with eyes of blue!
I've known too many a such," he sighed;
     "Maybe I know this . . . mon Dieu!"

He raised the head of the heedless Dead;
     He fingered the frozen face. . . .
Then a deathly spell on the watchers fell --
     God! it was still, that place!

He raised the head of the careless Dead;
     He fumbled a vagrant curl;
And then with his sightless smile he said:
     "It's only my little girl."

"Dear, my dear, did they hurt you so!
     Come to your daddy's heart. . . ."
Aye, and he held so tight, you know,
     They were hard to force apart.

No! Paris isn't always gay;
     And the morgue has its stories too:
You are a writer of tales, you say --
     Then there is a tale for you.


Scheme ABAB CDCD EFED DGXG DHDH IJIJ BFBF
Poetic Form Quatrain 
Metre 1110110101 11100111 0011010111 1010101 11111011 1100111 1111110111 0111101 1010101111 0101111 111100111 1011111 11011011 1100101 1010110101 111111 110110101 1100101 01111111 1101101 11111111 111101 10111111 1011101 1101011 00111101 110101111 1110111
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 1,068
Words 205
Sentences 25
Stanzas 7
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4
Lines Amount 28
Letters per line (avg) 27
Words per line (avg) 7
Letters per stanza (avg) 107
Words per stanza (avg) 30
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 20, 2023

1:01 min read
146

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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