Moral
Wives of great men oft remind usWe should make our wives sublime,But the years advancing find usVainly working over-time.We could minimise our workBy the methods of the Turk.
Words in this poem
- remind v. t.
- To put (one) in mind of something; to bring to the remembrance of; to bring to the notice or consideration of (a person).
- minimise v. t.
- To reduce to the smallest part or proportion possible; to reduce to a minimum. Bentham.
- turk n.
- A member of any of numerous Tartar tribes of Central Asia, etc.; esp., one of the dominant race in Turkey. [Per. Turk; probably of Tartar origin: cf. F. Turc.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Moral 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, Moral, in Verse and Worse (1905), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #36702, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/graham-verse-and-worse/moral-9.html, id L23318.
Form and metre
Moral is 6 lines in a single stanza. It rhymes ABABCC. The metre is trochaic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 87%).
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 usA · sublimeB · usA · timeB · workC · turkC
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Wives of great men oft remind us | 8 | ·····˘/· |
| We should make our wives sublime, | 8 | ···/˘·˘/ |
| But the years advancing find us | 8 | ···˘/˘·· |
| Vainly working over-time. | 7 | /˘/˘··· |
| We could minimise our work | 8 | ··/˘·/˘· |
| By the methods of the Turk. | 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.