Analysis of Book Lover
Robert William Service 1874 – 1958
I keep collecting books I know
I'll never, never read;
My wife and daughter tell me so,
And yet I never head.
"Please make me," says some wistful tome,
"A wee bit of yourself."
And so I take my treasure home,
And tuck it in a shelf.
And now my very shelves complain;
They jam and over-spill.
They say: "Why don't you ease our strain?"
"some day," I say, "I will."
So book by book they plead and sigh;
I pick and dip and scan;
Then put them back, distrest that I
Am such a busy man.
Now, there's my Boswell and my Sterne,
my Gibbon and Defoe;
To savour Swift I'll never learn,
Montaigne I may not know.
On Bacon I will never sup,
For Shakespeare I've no time;
Because I'm busy making up
These jingly bits of rhyme.
Chekov is caviare to me,
While Stendhal makes me snore;
Poor Proust is not my cup of tea,
And Balzac is a bore.
I have their books, I love their names,
And yet alas! they head,
With Lawrence, Joyce and Henry James,
My Roster of Unread.
I think it would be very well
If I commit a crime,
And get put in a prison cell
And not allowed to rhyme;
Yet given all these worthy books
According to my need,
I now caress with loving looks,
But never, never read.
Scheme | ABABCDCD EFEFGHGH IAIAJKJK LMLMNBNB OKOKPXPB |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Etheree (28%) Tetractys (20%) |
Metre | 11010111 110101 11010111 011101 11111101 011101 01111101 011001 01110101 110101 111111101 111111 11111101 110101 1111111 110101 11110011 110001 1111101 11111 11011101 11111 01110101 11111 11111 110111 11111111 01101 11111111 010111 11010101 110101 11111101 110101 01100101 010111 11011101 010111 11011101 110101 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,134 |
Words | 237 |
Sentences | 14 |
Stanzas | 5 |
Stanza Lengths | 8, 8, 8, 8, 8 |
Lines Amount | 40 |
Letters per line (avg) | 22 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 175 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 46 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 19, 2023
- 1:11 min read
- 77 Views
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"Book Lover" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 6 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/32025/book-lover>.
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