Analysis of Humility



My virtues in Carara stone
Cut carefully you all my scan;
Beneath I lie, a fetid bone,
The marble worth more than the man.

If on my pure tomb they should grave
My vices,--how the folks would grin!
And say with sympathetic wave:
"Like us he was a man of sin."

And somehow he consoled thereby,
Knowing they may, though Hades bent,
When finally they come to die,
Enjoy a snow-white monument.

And maybe it is just as well
When we from life and lust are riven,
That though our souls should sink to hell
Our tombs point: Destination Heaven!


Scheme ABAB CDCD EXEX FGFG
Poetic Form Quatrain  (75%)
Metre 110011 11001111 01110101 01011101 11111111 11010111 0110101 11110111 0110111 10111101 11001111 01011100 01011111 111101110 111011111 101101010
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 527
Words 104
Sentences 6
Stanzas 4
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4, 4
Lines Amount 16
Letters per line (avg) 26
Words per line (avg) 6
Letters per stanza (avg) 104
Words per stanza (avg) 25
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

30 sec read
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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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