Analysis of The Hat



In city shop a hat I saw
That to my fancy seemed to strike,
I gave my wage to buy the straw,
And make myself a one the like.

I wore it to the village fair;
Oh proud I was, though poor was I.
The maids looked at me with a stare,
The lads looked at me with a sigh.

I wore it Sunday to the Mass.
The other girls wore handkerchiefs.
I saw them darkly watch and pass,
With sullen smiles, with hidden griefs.

And then with sobbing fear I fled,
But they waylayed me on the street,
And tore the hat from off my head,
And trampled it beneath their feet.

I sought the Church; my grief was wild,
And by my mother's grave I sat:
. . . I've never cried for clay-cold child,
As I wept for that ruined hat.


Scheme ABAB CDCD EXEA FGFG HIHI
Poetic Form Quatrain 
Metre 01010111 11110111 11111101 0110101 11110101 11111111 01111101 01111101 1111101 01011100 11110101 11011101 01110111 1111101 01011111 01010111 11011111 01110111 11011111 11111101
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 680
Words 143
Sentences 12
Stanzas 5
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4, 4, 4
Lines Amount 20
Letters per line (avg) 26
Words per line (avg) 7
Letters per stanza (avg) 104
Words per stanza (avg) 29
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 29, 2023

43 sec read
122

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…

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