Wherein Wrong-Doers Suffer
And is it true? It is not true!And if it was it wouldn’t doFor people such as me and you,Who very nearly all day longAre doing something rather wrong.
About this text
Wherein Wrong-Doers Suffer is in the public domain. This text is taken from Sonnets and Verse, Project Gutenberg ebook #60663; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Hilaire Belloc, Wherein Wrong-Doers Suffer, in Sonnets and Verse (1923), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #60663, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/belloc-sonnets-verse/wherein-wrong-doers-suffer.html, id L21664.
Form and metre
Wherein Wrong-Doers Suffer is 5 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets, 80% of the lines: octosyllabic couplets. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic tetrameter.
See other poems in octosyllabic couplets, 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 AAABB trueA · doA · youA · longB · wrongB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| And is it true? It is not true! | 8 | ········ |
| And if it was it wouldn’t do | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| For people such as me and you, | 8 | ·/˘····· |
| Who very nearly all day long | 8 | ·/˘/˘··· |
| Are doing something rather wrong. | 8 | ·/˘/˘/˘· |
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.