Analysis of Our Kind Of A Man
James Whitcomb Riley 1849 (Greenfield) – 1916 (Indianapolis)
1
The kind of a man for you and me!
He faces the world unflinchingly,
And smites, as long as the wrong resists,
With a knuckled faith and force like fists:
He lives the life he is preaching of,
And loves where most is the need of love;
His voice is clear to the deaf man's ears,
And his face sublime through the blind man's tears;
The light shines out where the clouds were dim,
And the widow's prayer goes up for him;
The latch is clicked at the hovel door
And the sick man sees the sun once more,
And out o'er the barren fields he sees
Springing blossoms and waving trees,
Feeling as only the dying may,
That God's own servant has come that way,
Smoothing the path as it still winds on
Through the golden gate where his loved have gone.
2
The kind of a man for me and you!
However little of worth we do
He credits full, and abides in trust
That time will teach us how more is just.
He walks abroad, and he meets all kinds
Of querulous and uneasy minds,
And sympathizing, he shares the pain
Of the doubts that rack us, heart and brain;
And knowing this, as we grasp his hand
We are surely coming to understand!
He looks on sin with pitying eyes--
E'en as the Lord, since Paradise--,
Else, should we read, Though our sins should glow
As scarlet, they shall be white as snow--?
And feeling still, with a grief half glad,
That the bad are as good as the good are bad,
He strikes straight out for the Right-- and he
Is the kind of a man for you and me!
Scheme | ABCDDEEXXFFGGHHIIXX AJJKKLLMMNNXXCXOOBB |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 1 011011101 110011 011110101 101010111 110111101 011110111 111110111 0110110111 011110101 001011111 011110101 001110111 0110010111 10100101 101100101 111101111 100111111 1010111111 1 011011101 10101111 110100101 111111111 110101111 110000101 01001101 101111101 010111111 111010101 111111001 11101110 1111110111 110111111 010110111 10111110111 111110101 1011011101 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,420 |
Words | 288 |
Sentences | 8 |
Stanzas | 2 |
Stanza Lengths | 19, 19 |
Lines Amount | 38 |
Letters per line (avg) | 29 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 557 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 143 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:28 min read
- 129 Views
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"Our Kind Of A Man" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 30 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/20998/our-kind-of-a-man>.
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