Old Man Platypus
Andrew Barton Paterson 1864 (Orange, New South Wales) – 1941 (Sydney, New South Wales)
Far from the trouble and toil of town,
Where the reed beds sweep and shiver,
Look at a fragment of velvet brown,
Old Man Platypus drifting down,
Drifting along the river.
And he plays and dives in the river bends
In a style that is most elusive;
With few relations and fewer friends,
For Old Man Platypus descends
From a family most exclusive.
He shares his burrow beneath the bank
With his wife and his son and daughter
At the roots of the reeds and the grasses rank;
And the bubbles show where our hero sank
To its entrance under water.
Safe in their burrow below the falls
They live in a world of wonder,
Where no one visits and no one calls,
They sleep like little brown billiard balls
With their beaks tucked neatly under.
And he talks in a deep unfriendly growl
As he goes on his journey lonely;
For he's no relation to fish nor fowl,
Nor to bird nor beast, nor to horned owl;
In fact, he's the one and only!
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on April 30, 2023
- 53 sec read
- 900 Views
Quick analysis:
Scheme | ABAAB CDCCD EBEEB FBFFB GHGGH |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 898 |
Words | 177 |
Stanzas | 5 |
Stanza Lengths | 5, 5, 5, 5, 5 |
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"Old Man Platypus" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 10 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/2562/old-man-platypus>.
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