Analysis of Brightness Breaches and the Beak
Clarence Michael James Stanislaus Dennis 1876 (Auburn) – 1938 (Melbourne)
Bright young thing: Thou on the beaches
Life is gay and pleasure laden
All in vain the law beseeches
Courtesy from man and maiden
When a car, adorned with beauty
Unadorned, swings down the road,
There's a certain civic duty,
There's a cop, and there's a code,
There's Dame Caution - stuffy ogress -
Who deplores your carefree progress.
Bright young thing, who, with one finger
Nonchalantly on the steering,
(Ever indisposed to linger)
Down the beach road goes careering -
Youth's high claims need no endorsement,
Ever at convention scoffing;
But the fiends of law-enforcement
Lurk obscurely in the offing,
Prone to pounce on any stir made
Even by a scorching mermaid.
Bright young thing: Life can be brighter
When devoid of traffic danger.
E'en this poor pedestrian blighter,
E'en that slow and aged stranger
Has some right to go on living,
On this earth superfluous lagging.
But not the Law, so far forgiving,
Tires of its paternal nagging,
Ill-content to look askance
On sun-tanned insouciance.
Bright young thing upon the beaches,
Youth is urgent, youth is eager.
But no more the Law beseeches
With its admonitions meagre
Your observance of its ruling,
Your respect for cop, and Code,
But, if you must still go fooling,
'Stepping on it' up the road,
At its end, for flapper, shiek,
Lurks, relentlessly, The Beak.
Scheme | ABABCDCDXX EFEFGFGFHH EEEEFFFFXX AEAEFDFDFX |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Etheree (30%) |
Metre | 11111010 11101010 101011 10011010 10101110 011101 10101010 1010101 11101010 101111 11111110 10101010 101110 10111010 11111010 1010101 10111010 110010 11111011 1010101 11111110 10111010 111101001 11110110 11111110 1111010 110111010 101101010 1101101 1110100 11101010 11101110 111011 110101 10101110 1011101 11111110 1011101 1111101 1010001 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,284 |
Words | 225 |
Sentences | 8 |
Stanzas | 4 |
Stanza Lengths | 10, 10, 10, 10 |
Lines Amount | 40 |
Letters per line (avg) | 26 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 259 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 56 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:09 min read
- 89 Views
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"Brightness Breaches and the Beak" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 11 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/6242/brightness-breaches-and-the-beak>.
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