Portugal
You are requested, if you please,To note that here a people livesReferred to as the Portuguese;A fact which naturally givesThe funny man a good excuseTo call his friend a Portugoose.
Words in this poem
- funny a.
- Droll; comical; amusing; laughable. Funny bone. See crazy bone, under Crazy. [From Fun.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Portugal 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, Portugal, in Verse and Worse (1905), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #36702, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/graham-verse-and-worse/portugal.html, id L23310.
Form and metre
Portugal is 6 lines in a single stanza. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 93%).
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-- pleaseA · livesB · portugueseA · givesB · excuse · portugoose
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 |
|---|---|---|
| You are requested, if you please, | 8 | ··˘/˘··· |
| To note that here a people lives | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| Referred to as the Portuguese; | 8 | ˘/···/˘· |
| A fact which naturally gives | 8 | ···/˘˘˘· |
| The funny man a good excuse | 8 | ·/˘···˘/ |
| To call his friend a Portugoose. | 8 | ········ |
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.