Life and Nature - Scf - State College of Florida

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“My Cancer Cure”
"A year to live," the Doctor said;
"There is no cure," and shook his head.
Ah me! I felt as good as dead.
Yet quite resigned to fate was I,
Thinking: "Well, since I have to die
'Twill be beneath the open sky."
And so I sought a wildsome wood
Wherein a lonely cabin stood,
And doomed myself to solitude,
And there was no one I would see:
Each morn a farmer brought to me
My food and hung it on a tree.
Six eggs he brought, and milk a quart,
Enough for wretches of my sort
Whose life is fated to be short.
At night I laid me on the round,
In robe of buffalo wrapped round . . .
'Twas strange that I should sleep so
sound.
Rhyme Scheme: aaabbbcccdddeeefffggghhhiiijjj
1-2: Speaker starts off with something dramatic as his
doctor telling him he only has “a year to live” to get the
reader‟s attention and make an impact.
1 st Stanza: Introduces the topic and gives background
information: that the speaker is going to die and that he
wants to spend his final time with nature “beneath the
open sky.”
7-9: These lines include negative words like wildsome,
lonely, doomed, and solitude. The poet does this
because those are words that can describe how a cancer
patient is feeling. The speaker is still in the begin phase
of hearing about the bad news, so the words, and tone,
will be similar to how the person is feeling.
16-17: These two lines demonstrate how closely the
speaker is bonding to nature. He is lying on the ground
under the stars wrapped in buffalo fur to keep warm. He
wants to get away from the materialistic world and like a
nature life until he dies, so that means surviving in the wild
by only having nature on his side.