Analysis of The Headliner And The Breadliner



Moko, the Educated Ape is here,
The pet of vaudeville, so the posters say,
     And every night the gaping people pay
To see him in his panoply appear;
To see him pad his paunch with dainty cheer,
     Puff his perfecto, swill champagne, and sway
     Just like a gentleman, yet all in play,
Then bow himself off stage with brutish leer.

And as to-night, with noble knowledge crammed,
     I 'mid this human compost take my place,
I, once a poet, now so dead and damned,
     The woeful tears half freezing on my face:
"O God!" I cry, "let me but take his shape,
     Moko's, the Blest, the Educated Ape."


Scheme ABBCCBBA DEDEFF
Poetic Form
Metre 10100111 0111010101 01001010101 1110110001 1111111101 11110101 1101001101 1101111101 0111110101 1111010111 1101011101 0101110111 1111111111 10101001
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 600
Words 112
Sentences 4
Stanzas 2
Stanza Lengths 8, 6
Lines Amount 14
Letters per line (avg) 31
Words per line (avg) 8
Letters per stanza (avg) 219
Words per stanza (avg) 54
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

33 sec read
112

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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