Analysis of The Bother
Rudyard Kipling 1865 (Mumbai) – 1936 (London)
Hastily Adam our driver swallowed a curse in the darkness--
Petrol nigh at end and something wrong with a sprocket
Made him speer for the nearest town, when lo! at the crossways
Four blank letterless arms the virginal signpost extended.
"Look!" thundered Hugh the Radical. "This is the England we
boast of--
Bland, white-bellied, obese, but utterly useless for business.
They are repainting the signs and have left the job in the middle.
They are repainting the signs and traffic may stop till they've
done it,
Which is to say: till the son-of-a-gun of a local contractor,
Having laboriously wiped out every name for
Probably thirty miles round, be minded to finish his labour!
Had not the fool the sense to paint out and paint in together?"
Thus, not seeing his speech belied his Radical Gospel
(Which is to paint out the earth and then write "Damn" on the
shutter),
Hugh embroidered the theme imperially and stretched it
From some borough in Wales through our Australian possessions,
Making himself, reformer-wise, a bit of a nuisance
Till, with the help of Adam, we cast him out on the landscape.
Scheme | AXAXXXABXCDXXD BXDCXXX |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 10010101010010010 1011101011010 1111010111101 111101001010 11010100110101 11 111001110010110 1101001011010010 11010010101111 11 1111101101101010 10010001110011 100101111011011 110101111010010 11101101110010 1111101011110 10 1010011011 11101110010010 10010101011010 11011101111101 |
Closest metre | Iambic hexameter |
Characters | 1,094 |
Words | 193 |
Sentences | 10 |
Stanzas | 2 |
Stanza Lengths | 14, 7 |
Lines Amount | 21 |
Letters per line (avg) | 41 |
Words per line (avg) | 9 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 435 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 94 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 57 sec read
- 127 Views
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"The Bother" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 12 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/33378/the-bother>.
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