Analysis of My Country
Dorothea Mackeller 1885 (Point Piper, Sydney) – 1968 (Randwick)
The love of field and coppice
Of green and shaded lanes,
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins.
Strong love of grey-blue distance,
Brown streams and soft, dim skies
I know, but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror
The wide brown land for me!
The stark white ring-barked forests,
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon,
Green tangle of the brushes
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops,
And ferns the warm dark soil.
Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When, sick at heart, around us
We see the cattle die
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady soaking rain.
Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the rainbow gold,
For flood and fire and famine
She pays us back threefold.
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze ...
An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand
though Earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.
Scheme | aaaaaaxa baaaaacb adadaeae Bfafcxbx Bgxgaaaa bhchafbf |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 011101 110101 1101010 110011 1111110 110111 1111011 11110 110110 011101 1101010 110101 1101010 110101 0100010 011111 0111110 110101 0100110 011111 1101010 1111 0101011 010111 1111110 010011 1111011 110101 1101110 011101 0101110 010101 1111110 11011 11010010 11111 100101 110101 011110 110111 1101010 01101 1111110 11101 111101 010111 1111110 110111 |
Closest metre | Iambic trimeter |
Characters | 1,341 |
Words | 242 |
Sentences | 12 |
Stanzas | 6 |
Stanza Lengths | 8, 8, 8, 8, 8, 8 |
Lines Amount | 48 |
Letters per line (avg) | 22 |
Words per line (avg) | 5 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 173 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 40 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 28, 2023
- 1:12 min read
- 387 Views
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"My Country" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 27 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/8106/my-country>.
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