Uncle Joe
Poor Uncle Joe has gone, you know,To rest beyond the stars.I miss him, oh! I miss him so,--He had such good cigars.
About this text
Uncle Joe 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, Uncle Joe, in Verse and Worse (1905), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #36702, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/graham-verse-and-worse/uncle-joe.html, id L23328.
Form and metre
Uncle Joe 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 knowA · starsB · soA · cigarsB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Poor Uncle Joe has gone, you know, | 8 | ·/˘····· |
| To rest beyond the stars. | 6 | ······ |
| I miss him, oh! I miss him so,-- | 8 | ········ |
| He had such good cigars. | 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.