Analysis of The Child Impaled
John Le Gay Brereton 1871 (Sydney) – 1933
Beside the path, on either hand,
To keep the garden beds,
The rusted iron pickets stand
Thin shafts and pointed heads.
And straight my spirit swooping goes
Across the waves of time
Till I'm a little boy who knows
A fence is made to climb;
And bed and lawn and gloomy space
By thicket overgrown
Are wonderlands where I may trace
The beckoning Unknown.
But O the cruelty that strikes
My elder heart with dread
The writhing form upon the spikes,
The trickled pool of red!
So, every day I pass and see
The fence the urchin scales,
The little boy stands up in me
To curse the iron rails.
Scheme | ABAB CDCD EFEF GHGH IJIJ |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Traditional rhyme Quatrain |
Metre | 01011101 110101 01010101 110101 01110101 010111 11010111 011111 01010101 11001 111111 010001 1101011 110111 01010101 010111 110011101 010101 01011101 110101 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 571 |
Words | 112 |
Sentences | 5 |
Stanzas | 5 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4, 4 |
Lines Amount | 20 |
Letters per line (avg) | 23 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 92 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 22 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 33 sec read
- 48 Views
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"The Child Impaled" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 9 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/23694/the-child-impaled>.
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