Moral
Now, elderly men of the bachelor crew,With wrinkled hoseAnd spectacled nose,Don’t marry at all—you may take it as trueIf ever you doThe step you will rue,For your babes will be elderly—elderly too.
Words in this poem
- spectacled a.
- Furnished with spectacles; wearing spectacles.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Moral is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Bab Ballads, Project Gutenberg ebook #931; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: W. S. Gilbert, Moral, in The Bab Ballads (1869), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #931, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/gilbert-bab-ballads/moral.html, id L02382.
Form and metre
Moral is 7 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets, 86% 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. 88% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 7.0 syllables.
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 ABBAAAA crewA · hoseB · noseB · trueA · doA · rueA · tooA
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Now, elderly men of the bachelor crew, | 9 | ·/˘···/˘· |
| With wrinkled hose | 4 | ·/˘· |
| And spectacled nose, | 5 | ·/˘˘· |
| Don’t marry at all—you may take it as true | 11 | ·/˘········ |
| If ever you do | 5 | ·/˘·· |
| The step you will rue, | 5 | ····· |
| For your babes will be elderly—elderly too. | 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.