Analysis of The Return



They turned him loose; he bowed his head,
     A felon, bent and grey.
His face was even as the Dead,
     He had no word to say.

He sought the home of his old love,
     To look on her once more;
And where her roses breathed above,
     He cowered beside the door.

She sat there in the shining room;
     Her hair was silver grey.
He stared and stared from out the gloom;
     He turned to go away.

Her roses rustled overhead.
     She saw, with sudden start.
"I knew that you would come," she said,
     And held him to her heart.

Her face was rapt and angel-sweet;
     She touched his hair of grey;

But he, sob-shaken, at her feet,
     Could only pray and pray.


Scheme ABAB CDCD EBEB AFAF GB GB
Poetic Form Etheree  (30%)
Tetractys  (20%)
Metre 11111111 010101 11110101 111111 11011111 111011 01010101 110101 11100101 011101 11011101 111101 0101101 111101 11111111 011101 01110101 111111 11110101 110101
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 674
Words 125
Sentences 15
Stanzas 6
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4, 4, 2, 2
Lines Amount 20
Letters per line (avg) 23
Words per line (avg) 6
Letters per stanza (avg) 78
Words per stanza (avg) 20
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

37 sec read
36

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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