Analysis of Elvis in Hell
On days when he is not condemned to shake
off death and rise again
before the startled rearview gaze
of white-line-wired big riggers highballing
through Peoria or reflected in
the window-shopping reverie
of a Tulsa football widow, he's
imprisoned in a velvet painting in El Paso,
a plaster statuette in Nashville,
a T-shirt on the rack or
cursed with impersonators, harpies in white,
spangled bells drawling
old songs that scald like bacon grease.
But evening brings real agony
when night lights up the strip;
no headliner, just a warm-up, he
opens every night for the big marquee,
the boss of Mephistopheles,
who sets 'em howling with lines like:
"Take my dignity . . . please."
Scheme | ABCADEFGHIJAKELEECMF |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Etheree (25%) |
Metre | 1111110111 110101 01010101 11110111 1010010100 01010100 10101101 0100010100110 01001010 0111011 110100101 1011 11111101 11011100 111101 11010111 10100110101 0111 11110111 111001 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 660 |
Words | 113 |
Sentences | 6 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 20 |
Lines Amount | 20 |
Letters per line (avg) | 27 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 540 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 115 |
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Submitted on May 01, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 33 sec read
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"Elvis in Hell" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 11 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/70276/elvis-in-hell>.
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