Analysis of A Ballad of Abbreviations
Gilbert Keith Chesterton 1874 (Kensington, London) – 1936 (Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire)
The American's a hustler, for he says so,
And surely the American must know.
He will prove to you with figures why it pays so
Beginning with his boyhood long ago.
When the slow-maturing anecdote is ripest,
He'll dictate it like a Board of Trade Report,
And because he has no time to call a typist,
He calls her a Stenographer for short.
He is never known to loiter or malinger,
He rushes, for he knows he has 'a date' ;
He is always on the spot and full of ginger,
Which is why he is invariably late.
When he guesses that it's getting even later,
His vocabulary's vehement and swift,
And he yells for what he calls the Elevator,
A slang abbreviation for a lift.
Then nothing can be nattier or nicer
For those who like a light and rapid style.
Than to trifle with a work of Mr Dreiser
As it comes along in waggons by the mile.
He has taught us what a swift selective art meant
By description of his dinners and all that,
And his dwelling, which he says is an Apartment,
Because he cannot stop to say a flat.
We may whisper of his wild precipitation,
That it's speed in rather longer than a span,
But there really is a definite occasion
When he does not use the longest word he can.
When he substitutes, I freely make admission,
One shorter and much easier to spell ;
If you ask him what he thinks of Prohibition,
He may tell you quite succinctly it is Hell.
Scheme | AAAABBBB CBCBCBCB CDCDBBBB EFEFEGEG |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 0010001001111 0100010011 111111101111 010111101 1010101011 10111011101 001111111010 1100010011 1110111011 1101111101 11110101110 11111010001 111011101010 1110001 01111110100 010010101 110111110 1111010101 11101011101 1110101101 111110101011 10101110011 011011111010 0111011101 11101110010 11101010101 111010100010 11111010111 11101101010 1100110011 11111111010 11111010111 |
Closest metre | Iambic hexameter |
Characters | 1,365 |
Words | 261 |
Sentences | 11 |
Stanzas | 4 |
Stanza Lengths | 8, 8, 8, 8 |
Lines Amount | 32 |
Letters per line (avg) | 33 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 264 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 65 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:19 min read
- 145 Views
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"A Ballad of Abbreviations" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 12 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/15953/a-ballad-of-abbreviations>.
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