Seville



My Pa and Ma their honeymoon
Passed in an Andulasian June,
And though produced in Drury Lane,
I must have been conceived in Spain.
Now having lapsed from fair estate,
A coster's is my sorry fate;
Yet on my barrow lo! I wheel
The golden harvest of Saville.

"Sweet Spanish oranges!" I cry.
Ah! People deem not as they buy,
That in a dream a steel guitar
I strum beside the Alcázar,
And at the Miralda I meet
A signorita honey sweet,
And stroll beneath the silver moon
Like Pa and Ma that magic June.

Alack-a-day! I fear I'll never
Behold the golden Guadalquivir;
Yet here in Brixton how I feel
My spiritual home's Saville;
And hold the hope that some day I
Will visit there, if just to die;
Feeling I have not lived in vain
To crown my days in sunny Spain.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

44 sec read
56

Quick analysis:

Scheme AABBCCDE FFXFGGAA XFDEFFBB
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 740
Words 147
Stanzas 3
Stanza Lengths 8, 8, 8

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…

All Robert William Service poems | Robert William Service Books

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