Analysis of Life's Slacker
Edgar Albert Guest 1881 (Birmingham) – 1959 (Detroit, Michigan)
The saddest sort of death to die
Would be to quit the game called life
And know, beneath the gentle sky,
You'd lived a slacker in the strife.
That nothing men on earth would find
To mark the spot that you had filled;
That you must go and leave behind
No patch of soil your hands had tilled.
I know no greater shame than this:
To feel that yours were empty years;
That after death no man would miss
Your presence in this vale of tears;
That you had breathed the fragrant air
And sat by kindly fires that burn,
And in earth's riches had a share
But gave no labor in return.
Yet some men die this way, nor care:
They enter and they leave life's door
And at the end, their record's bare—
The world's no better than before.
A few false tears are shed, and then,
In busy service, they're forgot.
We have no time to mourn for men
Who lived on earth but served it not.
A man in perfect peace to die
Must leave some mark of toil behind,
Some building towering to the sky,
Some symbol that his heart was kind,
Some roadway where strange feet may tread
That out of gratitude he made;
He cannot bravely look ahead
Unless his debt to life is paid.
Scheme | ABABCXCA DXDXEFEF EGEGHIHI ACACJKJK |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 01011111 11110111 01010101 11010001 11011111 11011111 11110101 11111111 11110111 11110101 11011111 11001111 11110101 011101011 00110101 11110001 11111111 11001111 01011101 01110101 01111101 01010101 11111111 11111111 01001111 11111101 110100101 11011111 1111111 1111011 11010101 01111111 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,113 |
Words | 224 |
Sentences | 8 |
Stanzas | 4 |
Stanza Lengths | 8, 8, 8, 8 |
Lines Amount | 32 |
Letters per line (avg) | 28 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 221 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 56 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on April 23, 2023
- 1:09 min read
- 99 Views
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