Analysis of This, My Song, Is Made For Kerensky
(Being a Chant of the American Soap-Box and the Russian Revolution.)
O market square, O slattern place,
Is glory in your slack disgrace?
Plump quack doctors sell their pills,
Gentle grafters sell brass watches,
Silly anarchists yell their ills.
Shall we be as weird as these?
In the breezes nod and wheeze?
Heaven's mass is sung,
Tomorrow's mass is sung
In a spirit tongue
By wind and dust and birds,
The high mass of liberty,
While wave the banners red:
Sung round the soap-box,
A mass for soldiers dead.
When you leave your faction in the once-loved hall,
Like a true American tongue-lash them all,
Stand then on the corner under starry skies
And get you a gang of the worn and the wise.
The soldiers of the Lord may be squeaky when they rally,
The soldiers of the Lord are a queer little army,
But the soldiers of the Lord, before the year is through,
Will gather the whole nation, recruit all creation,
To smite the hosts abhorred, and all the heavens renew —
Enforcing with the bayonet the thing the ages teach —
Free speech!
Free speech!
Down with the Prussians, and all their works.
Down with the Turks.
Down with every army that fights against the soap-box,
The Pericles, Socrates, Diogenes soap-box,
The old Elijah, Jeremiah, John-the-Baptist soap-box,
The Rousseau, Mirabeau, Danton soap-box,
The Karl Marx, Henry George, Woodrow Wilson soap-box.
We will make the wide earth safe for the soap-box,
The everlasting foe of beastliness and tyranny,
Platform of liberty: — Magna Charta liberty,
Andrew Jackson liberty, bleeding Kansas liberty,
New-born Russian liberty: —
Battleship of thought,
The round world over,
Loved by the red-hearted,
Loved by the broken-hearted,
Fair young Amazon or proud tough rover,
Loved by the lion,
Loved by the lion,
Loved by the lion,
Feared by the fox.
The Russian Revolution is the world revolution.
Death at the bedstead of every Kaiser knocks.
The Hohenzollern army shall be felled like the ox.
The fatal hour is striking in all the doomsday clocks.
The while, by freedom's alchemy
Beauty is born.
Ring every sleigh-bell, ring every church bell,
Blow the clear trumpet, and listen for the answer: —
The blast from the sky of the Gabriel horn.
Hail the Russian picture around the little box: —
Exiles,
Troops in files,
Generals in uniform,
Mujiks in their smocks,
And holy maiden soldiers who have cut away their locks.
All the peoples and the nations in processions mad and great,
Are rolling through the Russian Soul as through a city gate: —
As though it were a street of stars that paves the shadowy deep.
And mighty Tolstoi leads the van along the stairway steep.
But now the people shout:
"Hail to Kerensky,
He hurled the tyrants out."
And this my song is made for Kerensky,
Prophet of the world-wide intolerable hope,
There on the soap-box, seasoned, dauntless,
There amid the Russian celestial kaleidoscope,
Flags of liberty, rags and battlesmoke.
Moscow and Chicago!
Come let us praise battling Kerensky,
Bravo! Bravo!
Comrade Kerensky the thunderstorm and rainbow!
Comrade Kerensky, Bravo, Bravo!
Scheme | a bbcxcdd eeexfghg iijjffkaklLL mmhhhhhhffffxnoonAAAh ahhhfpxnp hqqxbh rrss teteubue vevvv |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 1001100100110010010 1101111 11001101 1110111 1011110 10100111 1111111 0010101 10111 01111 00101 110101 0111100 110101 11011 011101 11111000111 10101001111 11101010101 01101101001 01010111101110 0101011011010 1010101010111 1100110011010 1101010101001 0101010010101 11 11 11010111 1101 11100101101011 0110111 01010010101011 00111011 01110111011 11101111011 00101110100 11100101100 10101001010100 1110100 1011 01110 110110 1101010 111011110 11010 11010 11010 1101 010010101010 11011100101 0110111101 0101011001011 01110100 1011 110011110011 101100101010 01101101001 101010010101 1 101 100010 1011 01010101110111 101000100010101 11010101110101 111001111101001 010110101011 110101 111 110101 01111111 101011010001 11011101 101010010010 11100101 1001 11111001 1010 1101001 111010 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 2,998 |
Words | 520 |
Sentences | 30 |
Stanzas | 10 |
Stanza Lengths | 1, 7, 8, 12, 21, 9, 6, 4, 8, 5 |
Lines Amount | 81 |
Letters per line (avg) | 30 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 240 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 52 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 2:36 min read
- 53 Views
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"This, My Song, Is Made For Kerensky" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 28 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/37414/this%2C-my-song%2C-is-made-for-kerensky>.
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