My Feud



I hate my neighbour Widow Green;
     I'd like to claw her face;
But if I did she'd make a scene
     And run me round the place:
For widows are in way of spleen
     A most pugnacious race.

And yet I must do something quick
     To keep the hag in line,
Since her red rooster chose to pick
     Five lettuce heads of mine:
And so I fed it arsenic
     Which it did not decline.

It disappeared, but on my mat
     Before a week had sped
I found Mi-mi, my tabby cat
     And it was stoney dead;
I diagnosed with weeping that
     On strychnine it had fed.

And so I bought a hamburg steak,
     Primed it with powdered glass,
And left it for her dog to take
     With gulping from the grass:
Since then, although I lie awake
     I have not seen it pass.

Well, that's the scoring up to date:
     And as I read a text
From Job to justify my hate
     I wonder who'll be next?
Somehow I feel that one must die,
     Ma Green or I.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

54 sec read
61

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABABAB CDCDCD EFEFEF GHGHGH IJIJKK
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 906
Words 179
Stanzas 5
Stanza Lengths 6, 6, 6, 6, 6

Robert William Service

Robert William Service was a poet and writer sometimes referred to as the Bard of the Yukon He is best-known for his writings on the Canadian North including the poems The Shooting of Dan McGrew The Law of the Yukon and The Cremation of Sam McGee His writing was so expressive that his readers took him for a hard-bitten old Klondike prospector not the later-arriving bank clerk he actually was Robert William Service was born 16 January 1874 in Preston England but also lived in Scotland before emigrating to Canada in 1894 Service went to the Yukon Territory in 1904 as a bank clerk and became famous for his poems about this region which are mostly in his first two books of poetry He wrote quite a bit of prose as well and worked as a reporter for some time but those writings are not nearly as well known as his poems He travelled around the world quite a bit and narrowly escaped from France at the beginning of the Second World War during which time he lived in Hollywood California He died 11 September 1958 in France Incidentally he played himself in a movie called The Spoilers starring John Wayne and Marlene Dietrich more…

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