The Lost Legion
'Less you want your toes trod off you'd better get back at once,For the bullocks are walking two by two,The byles are walking two by two,And the elephants bring the guns.Ho! Yuss!Great--big--long--black--forty-pounder guns:Jiggery-jolty to and fro,Each as big as a launch in tow--Blind--dumb--broad-breeched--beggars o' battering-guns.
About this text
The Lost Legion is in the public domain. This text is taken from Songs from Books, Project Gutenberg ebook #15529; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Rudyard Kipling, The Lost Legion, in Songs from Books (1912), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #15529, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/kipling-songs-from-books/the-lost-legion.html, id L20355.
Form and metre
The Lost Legion is 9 lines in a single stanza. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 75%).
See other poems in iambic tetrameter.
Measured by Laurel's pipeline, not copied from a handbook: how stress and metre are counted, how rhyme is lettered, how a drifted rhyme is found. Where the dictionary cannot confirm a rhyme the letter is withheld, not guessed.
Rhyme words, stanza by stanza
The word that ends each line, lettered by the rhyme it makes; a dash is a line whose rhyme the dictionary could not confirm.
- 1 -AAB-BCCB once · twoA · twoA · gunsB · yuss · gunsB · froC · towC · gunsB
Scansion, line by line
Each line with its syllable count and the stresses the words themselves fix: / stressed, ˘ unstressed, · a syllable the word leaves free and the metre decides. Read against iambic tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| 'Less you want your toes trod off you'd better get back at once, | 14 | ········/˘···· |
| For the bullocks are walking two by two, | 10 | ··/˘·/˘··· |
| The byles are walking two by two, | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| And the elephants bring the guns. | 8 | ··/˘˘··· |
| Ho! Yuss! | 2 | ·· |
| Great--big--long--black--forty-pounder guns: | 8 | ····/˘/· |
| Jiggery-jolty to and fro, | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| Each as big as a launch in tow-- | 8 | ········ |
| Blind--dumb--broad-breeched--beggars o' battering-guns. | 10 | ····/˘·/˘· |
The reader shows the same poem with its rhymes coloured and a stress row above each line, the notes beside their stanzas, and any word's definition on a tap; the analysis page takes the whole book apart. How every part of this site was made.