Analysis of London Types: Beef-Eater
William Ernest Henley 1849 (Gloucester) – 1903 (Woking)
His beat lies knee-high through a dust of story-
A dust of terror and torture, grief and crime;
Ghosts that are England's wonder, and shame, and glory
Throng where he walks, an antic of old time;
A sense of long immedicable tears
Were ever with him, could his ears but heed;
The stern Hic Jacets of our bloodiest years
Are for his reading, had he eyes to read,
But here, where Crookback raged, and Cranmer trimmed,
And More and Strafford faced the axe's proving,
He shows that Crown the desperate Colonel nimmed,
Or simply keeps the Country Cousin moving,
Or stays such Cockney pencillers as would shame
The wall where some dead Queen hath traced her name.
Scheme | ABABCDEFGHDHII |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 11111101110 01110010101 111101001010 1111110111 011111 0101111111 01111101001 1111011111 111110101 010110110 1111010101 11010101010 111101111 0111111101 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 664 |
Words | 119 |
Sentences | 2 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 14 |
Lines Amount | 14 |
Letters per line (avg) | 37 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 519 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 117 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 36 sec read
- 67 Views
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"London Types: Beef-Eater" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 4 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/40504/london-types%3A-beef-eater>.
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