Analysis of Old Town Types No. 10 - Big Doc Littlejohn
Clarence Michael James Stanislaus Dennis 1876 (Auburn) – 1938 (Melbourne)
Big Doc. Littlejohn, and ugly man and tall,
He wasn't very graceful, no part of him was small;
Big, frame, big head, huge hands, and red;
But gentle as a woman's as he stooped above the bed,
His great voice muted and the jaw out-thrust
And something there behind his eyes that captured human trust -
Big John Littlejohn, who drove until he died,
In his abbot buggy to the farms outside.
The family physician and the family's true friend;
No household in that wide, new land but loved him to the end;
And the old, fat midwife revered him as a saint:
'Sent straight from God, me dear,' says she. 'A human man she ain't.
No human flesh could bear it, no heart withstand the test,
The slavin', drivin', day an' night with no full hour of rest.'
But Big John Littlejohn, with one of his tired smiles,
Climbed in his abbot buggy for another seven miles.
He'd never met a vitamin, he seldom sought a knife;
But he healed full many a body and he saved full many a life.
For ten years, for twenty years, for forty years he toiled
His aid unstinted and his heart unspoiled,
The friend of rich and poor alike, at everybody's call
For large fee, for small fee, or no fee at all,
In his old abbot buggy, with his wind-blown hair,
Rushing to another case behind his bay blood mare.
They found him on one winter dawn, low-huddled in the seat
Of the old abbot buggy, with the rug about his feet;
The great frame at rest at last, the mind rid of its load,
While the blood mare nibbled at the grass beside the road.
And the sad folk who found him there, before ought else, they say,
First knelt them in the roadside mud and bent their heads to pray
For great John Littlejohn, the grey man and kind,
The healer and the friend, who left not wealth nor foe behind.
Scheme | AABBCCDD EEFFGGHH IIJJAAKK LLMMNNOO |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 1110010101 1101010111111 11111101 11010101110101 1111000111 01010111110101 1110110111 01101010111 01000100010011 1101111111101 00111011101 11111111010111 1101111110101 01011111111011 111101111101 10110101010101 11010100110101 11111001001111001 1111101110111 11101101 0111010111001 11111111111 011101011111 1010101011111 11111101110001 10110101010111 0111111011111 1011101010101 00111111011111 1110011011111 1111001101 01000111111101 |
Closest metre | Iambic hexameter |
Characters | 1,722 |
Words | 336 |
Sentences | 11 |
Stanzas | 4 |
Stanza Lengths | 8, 8, 8, 8 |
Lines Amount | 32 |
Letters per line (avg) | 42 |
Words per line (avg) | 10 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 335 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 83 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:42 min read
- 47 Views
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"Old Town Types No. 10 - Big Doc Littlejohn" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 11 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/6480/old-town-types-no.-10---big-doc-littlejohn>.
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