Analysis of Les Grands Mutiles

Robert William Service 1874 – 1958



I saw three wounded of the war:
And the first had lost his eyes;
And the second went on wheels and had
No legs below the thighs;
And the face of the third was featureless,
And his mouth ran cornerwise.
So I made a rhyme about each one,
And this is how my fancies run.


Scheme ABCBDBEE
Poetic Form
Metre 11110101 0011111 001011101 110101 0011011100 01111 111010111 01111101
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 268
Words 57
Sentences 3
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 8
Lines Amount 8
Letters per line (avg) 26
Words per line (avg) 7
Letters per stanza (avg) 206
Words per stanza (avg) 55
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

17 sec read
76

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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