Analysis of Thoughtless Cruelty
Charles Lamb 1775 (Inner Temple, London) – 1834 (Edmonton, London)
There, Robert, you have killed that fly,
And should you thousand ages try
The life you've taken to supply,
You could not do it.
You surely must have been devoid
Of thought and sense, to have destroyed
A thing which no way you annoyed-
You'll one day rue it.
'Twas but a fly perhaps you'll say,
That's born in April, dies in May;
That does but just learn to display
His wings one minute,
And in the next is vanished quite:
A bird devours it in his flight,
Or come a cold blast in the night,
There's no breath in it.
The bird but seeks his proper food;
And Providence, whose power endued
That fly with life, when it thinks good,
May justly take it.
But you have no excuses for't;
A life by Nature made so short,
Less reason is that you for sport
Should shorter make it.
A fly a little thing you rate,
But, Robert, do not estimate
A creature's pain by small or great;
The greatest being
Can have but fibres, nerves, and flesh,
And these the smallest ones possess,
Although their frame and structure less
Escape our seeing.
Scheme | AAAB CCCB DDDE FFFB GGXB XHHB IEIJ XKKJ |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 11011111 01110101 01110101 11111 11011101 11011101 01111101 11111 11010111 11010101 11111101 11110 00011101 010101011 11011001 11101 01111101 010011001 11111111 11011 111101011 01110111 11011111 11011 01010111 11011100 0111111 01010 1111101 01010101 1110101 011010 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 996 |
Words | 195 |
Sentences | 7 |
Stanzas | 8 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4 |
Lines Amount | 32 |
Letters per line (avg) | 25 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 98 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 24 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:00 min read
- 155 Views
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