Analysis of FORTY-FIVE
When the mercury touches forty-five
You think that you might die,
You wipe a sweat trail from your brow
Then swat away a fly.
When the bitumen begins to melt
And stick beneath your shoes,
You pray for a return to winter
With its cold and rain, and flu.
When you feel that you are melting
Within your living room,
The voice upon the television
Fills your heart with gloom:
“The weather will continue fine,”
Is his sick, perverted joke,
And all your dreams of coolness
Fled when the bastard spoke.
You run a cold bath for relief
And dive headfirst in it,
You take a book and reading glasses
And soak for three hundred minutes.
When you get out at 7 PM
It seems the air itself is on fire,
Soon you’re dripping wet again
This time as you perspire.
And by 7:30 PM you’re fouler
Than before you had your bath,
As new record temperatures soar
You pray to God summer won’t last.
It’s forty-four one day, then it’s forty-five
You find yourself near melting again,
And soon the penny starts to drop
This hellish summer may never end.
With global warming going overtime
New record temperatures are oft-times set,
And no matter how high predictions go
The predictions are always ready met.
No end’s insight to summertime
And again we have a forty-plus day,
And as often as we might pray to God
The summer sun won’t go away.
So we’re soaking in our own foulness
And longing for the colder times,
When winter freezes our marrow hard
And brings with it much cooler climes.
THE END
© Copyright 2021 Philip Roberts
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Scheme | ABCB XXDX XEXE XFGF XXXX XDHX CXXX AHXI JKXK JLXL GMXM IXX |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 1010010101 111111 11011111 110101 10100111 010111 111001110 1110101 11111110 011101 01010100 11111 01010101 1110101 0111110 110101 11011101 011101 110101010 01111010 1111111 1101011110 1110101 111101 011111 1011111 11011001 11111011 11011111101 110111001 01010111 110101101 110101010 1011001111 0110110101 001011101 111110 0011101011 0110111111 01011101 1010010110 01010101 1101010101 01111101 01 101010 100100010 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,503 |
Words | 280 |
Sentences | 11 |
Stanzas | 12 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 3 |
Lines Amount | 47 |
Letters per line (avg) | 26 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 101 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 23 |
About this poem
I wrote this poem in the hellish Feb of 2009, when Victoria had its hottest seven or eight days in history. In fact, after I wrote this poem, we had a 46-degree day, then a 47-degree day, then a 47.1-degree day, then a 47.2-degree day.
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Written on 2009
Submitted by PHIL_ROBERTS on August 20, 2021
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:24 min read
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"FORTY-FIVE" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 28 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/107527/forty-five>.
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