Analysis of Of Joyce Kilmer and War



Whenever he went to Suffern along the Erie track,
he saw a poor old farmhouse, crumbling, broken, and black.
It touched his deep compassion to see it falling apart,
so, he wrote a poem about it, revealing his tender heart.

He was a man of talent with a selfless, empathic soul.
The many poems and skills he shared proved goodness was his goal.
As a husband and a father, a man just in his prime,
he agreed to join his countrymen to oppose aggressors’ crime.  

He caught a sniper’s bullet in a country far away
in a war not of his making. A great man was lost that day.
It was a war so brutal, they said it would end them all.
But, alas, that’s not what happened. Many millions more would fall.

Rich and powerful men from their lofty, sheltered throne,
will sacrifice the lives of others, but will not risk their own
If the men who want to start a war, were the ones who had to go,
we might just see an end to it, and young men could live and grow.


Scheme AABB CCDD EEFF GGHH
Poetic Form Quatrain 
Metre 01011110010101 1101111001001 11110101111001 1110100110101101 1101110101011 010100111110111 10100010011011 1011111001010101 11010100010101 001111100111111 11011101111111 101111101010111 1010011110101 11001110111111 1011111010011111 111111110111101
Closest metre Iambic heptameter
Characters 962
Words 201
Sentences 12
Stanzas 4
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4, 4
Lines Amount 16
Letters per line (avg) 46
Words per line (avg) 12
Letters per stanza (avg) 182
Words per stanza (avg) 46

About this poem

When the poem "The House with No One in It" was brought to my attention, it came with the information that it was written shortly before he was killed in WWI. I loved the poem so much I memorized it and then looked up more information about Joyce Kilmer, whom I'd previously known only by his poem," Trees" which I learned in my school days.

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Written on June 26, 2023

Submitted by janet_1 on June 26, 2023

1:00 min read
72

Janet Muirhead Hill

Janet Muirhead Hill is a novelist who occasionally writes poetry for fun and for self-expression. Her published books include the Miranda and Starlight series of horse stories for middle-grade readers and other fiction. more…

All Janet Muirhead Hill poems | Janet Muirhead Hill Books

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