Aunt Eliza
In the drinking-well(Which the plumber built her)Aunt Eliza fell,----We must buy a filter.
Words in this poem
- plumber n.
- One who works in lead; esp., one who furnishes, fits, and repairs lead, iron, or glass pipes, and other apparatus for the conveyance of water, gas, or drainage in buildings. [F. plombier. See Plumb.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Aunt Eliza is in the public domain. This text is taken from Verse and Worse, Project Gutenberg ebook #36702; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Harry Graham, Aunt Eliza, in Verse and Worse (1905), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #36702, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/graham-verse-and-worse/aunt-eliza.html, id L23329.
Form and metre
Aunt Eliza is 4 lines in a single stanza. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic tetrameter.
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 A-A- wellA · her · fellA · filter
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 |
|---|---|---|
| In the drinking-well | 5 | ··/˘· |
| (Which the plumber built her) | 6 | ··/˘·· |
| Aunt Eliza fell,---- | 5 | ·˘/˘· |
| We must buy a filter. | 6 | ····/˘ |
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.