Analysis of Vive Anarchy
Edwin James Brady 1869 (Carcoar, New South Wales) – 1952 (Pambula, New South Wales)
With the lifting of the curtain,
Distance, dim, but grimly certain,
Breaks my vision of a city, populous and great,
To my senses, sorrow-sated,
Senses sad and satiated, Faintly comes the thunder peal of treasured wrong and hate
Broken down,
Beaten down,
By awakened people and the iron arm of Fate.
Pallid forms, by famine shrunken,
Helots, harlots, ribald, drunken,
Wine and blood-wet, onward thro' the torchlit highways sweep,
Through a city disunited,
Through a city flame ignited,
To the sound of song and trumpet and the cannon's deep
Distant boom,
Through the gloom,
While the fire fiends madly leaps from tower to temple steep.
Reinforced from slum and alley,
By this wild and weird reveille,
Pours the army of the people where their banners drape,
In a city barricaded,
In a city fusilladed
By the deadly rifle and the Gatling and the grape,
Crashing down,
Smashing down
Lanes and alleys filthy, and the foul abode of rape.
Tyrants flee and cowards falter-,
For a lamp-post and a halter
Wait for every tyrant at the corner of the street,
In the hour of retribution,
In the night of revolution,
When on common ground the tyrant and the helot meet,
Endless wrongs,
Countless wrongs,
Burning in the helot's bosom - fanned to fever heat.
Let the tyrant beg no pity-
His the palace, his the city,
His the silken raiment and the costly food and wine;
Ours the forms emaciated,
Of the women violated,
Ours the endless torture in the workshop and the mine;
Hunted down,
Hounded down
To the level of the felon and the concubine.
By our women fever-stricken,
Where the foetid odours thicken
In the homes of hunger, where the children cry for bread;
By your soulless apathetic,
Scorning of our wrongs pathetic,
By the seas of blood and tears by generations shed,
Stealing down,
Streaming down-
Now we ask, with smoking rifle, "vengeance on your head."
Marching on with footsteps steady,
Shotted guns and bayonets ready,
Goes the army of the people, in the days to be,
Through a city barricaded,
Through a city fusilladed,
Where the discontented masses struggle to be free,
Breaking down,
Beating down
Wrongs of ages to the song of "Long Live Anarchy."
Scheme | AABCBDDBAAEBCEFFE GGHCBHDDH IIJAAJKKJ GGLCCLDDL AAMNNMDDM GGGCBGDDG |
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Poetic Form | |
Metre | 10101010 10111010 1110101010001 11101010 101011010101110101 101 101 1010100010111 10111010 1011010 10111010111 10101 10101010 1011101000101 101 101 101011011101101 0111010 111011 1010101011101 0010100 00101 1010100010001 101 101 1010100010111 10101010 10110010 11100101010101 00101010 0011010 1110101000101 101 101 100011011101 10101110 10101010 101010010101 10010100 10101000 1001010001001 101 101 101010100010 110101010 101110 0011101010111 1110010 11101010 101110110101 101 101 1111101010111 1011110 1101010 1010101000111 1010100 10101 100101010111 101 101 1110101111100 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 2,226 |
Words | 374 |
Sentences | 8 |
Stanzas | 6 |
Stanza Lengths | 17, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9 |
Lines Amount | 62 |
Letters per line (avg) | 27 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 283 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 62 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:52 min read
- 99 Views
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"Vive Anarchy" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 2 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/10108/vive-anarchy>.
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