Analysis of Expectation



My flask of wine was ruby red
And swift I ran my sweet to see;
With eyes that snapped delight I said:
"How mad with love a lad can be!"
The moon was laughing overhead;
I danced as nimbly as a flea.

Thought I: In two weeks time we'll wed;
No more a lonesome widow she;
For I have bought a double bed
And I will father children three.
So singing like a lark I sped
To her who ne'er expected me.

And then I went with wary tread,
Her sweet surprise to greet with glee;
To where her lamplit lattice shed
A rosy radiance on the lea:
. . . And then my heart sank low like lead,
Two shadows on the blind to see.

A man was sitting on the bed,
And she was nudely on his knee. . . .
I saw her face drain white with dread,
I saw her lover madly flee. . . .
Oh how her blood is ruby red,
And I await the gallows tree


Scheme ABABAB ABABAB ABABAB ABABAB
Poetic Form
Metre 11111101 01111111 11110111 11110111 01110101 11110101 11011111 11010101 11110101 01110101 11010111 10110101 01111101 01011111 1101101 010100101 01111111 1110111 01110101 0111111 11011111 11010101 11011101 01010101
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 788
Words 167
Sentences 17
Stanzas 4
Stanza Lengths 6, 6, 6, 6
Lines Amount 24
Letters per line (avg) 25
Words per line (avg) 7
Letters per stanza (avg) 150
Words per stanza (avg) 43
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 14, 2023

50 sec read
121

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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