Analysis of The Bulls



Six bulls I saw as black as jet,
With crimsoned horns and amber eyes
That chewed their cud without a fret,
And swished to brush away the flies,
Unwitting their soon sacrifice.

It is the Corpus Christi fête;
Processions crowd the bannered ways;
Before the alters women wait,
While men unite in hymns of praise,
And children look with angel gaze.

The bulls know naught of holiness,
To pious pomp their eyes are blind;
Their brutish brains will never guess
The sordid passions of mankind:
Poor innocents, they wait resigned.

Till in a black room each is penned,
While from above with cruel aim
Two torturers with lances bend
To goad their fieriness to flame,
To devil them to play the game.

The red with rage and mad with fear
They charge into the roaring ring;
Against the mockery most near
Of human might their hate they fling,
In futile, blind blood-boltering.

And so the day of unction ends;
Six bulls are dragged across the sand.
Ferocity and worship blends,
Religion and red thirst hold hands . . .
Dear Christ! 'Tis hard to understand!


Scheme ABABX XCXCC XDXDD EFEFF GHGHH IJIXJ
Poetic Form Etheree  (30%)
Tetractys  (20%)
Metre 11111111 1110101 11110101 01110101 0101110 110101011 0101011 01010101 1110111 01011101 01111100 11011111 11011101 01010111 11001101 10011111 11011101 1100111 111111 11011101 01110111 11010101 01010011 11011111 010111 0101111 11110101 01000101 01001111 1111101
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 1,024
Words 185
Sentences 12
Stanzas 6
Stanza Lengths 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5
Lines Amount 30
Letters per line (avg) 28
Words per line (avg) 6
Letters per stanza (avg) 138
Words per stanza (avg) 31
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

55 sec read
67

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…

All Robert William Service poems | Robert William Service Books

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