Mother-Wit
When wilful little Willie BlackThrew all the tea-things at his mother,She murmured, as she hurled them back,'One good Tea-urn deserves another!'
About this text
Mother-Wit 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, Mother-Wit, in Verse and Worse (1905), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #36702, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/graham-verse-and-worse/mother-wit.html, id L23327.
Form and metre
Mother-Wit is 4 lines in a single stanza. It rhymes ABAB. 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 ABAB blackA · motherB · backA · anotherB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| When wilful little Willie Black | 8 | ···/˘/˘· |
| Threw all the tea-things at his mother, | 9 | ·······/˘ |
| She murmured, as she hurled them back, | 8 | ·/˘····· |
| 'One good Tea-urn deserves another!' | 9 | ····˘/˘/˘ |
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.