Baby
Baby roused its father's ire,By a cold and formal lisp;So he placed it on the fire,And reduced it to a crisp.Mother said, 'Oh, stop a bit!This is overdoing it!'
Words in this poem
- lisp v. i.
- To pronounce the sibilant letter s imperfectly; to give s and z the sound of th; -- a defect common among children. [OE. lispen, lipsen, AS. wlisp stammering, lisping; akin to D. & OHG. lispen to lisp, G. lispeln, Sw. läspa, Dan. lespe.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Baby 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, Baby, in Verse and Worse (1905), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #36702, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/graham-verse-and-worse/baby.html, id L23332.
Form and metre
Baby is 6 lines in a single stanza. It rhymes ABABCC. The metre is trochaic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 95%).
See other poems in trochaic 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 ABABCC ireA · lispB · fireA · crispB · bitC · itC
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 trochaic tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Baby roused its father's ire, | 8 | /˘·˘·/˘· |
| By a cold and formal lisp; | 7 | ····/˘· |
| So he placed it on the fire, | 8 | ······/˘ |
| And reduced it to a crisp. | 8 | ·˘/˘···· |
| Mother said, 'Oh, stop a bit! | 7 | /˘····· |
| This is overdoing it!' | 7 | ··/˘/˘· |
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.