Nude Young Dancer
What jungle tree have you slept under,Midnight dancer of the jazzy hour?What great forest has hung its perfumeLike a sweet veil about your bower?
What jungle tree have you slept under,Night-dark girl of the swaying hips?What star-white moon has been your mother?To what clean boy have you offered your lips?
Words in this poem
- jungle n.
- A dense growth of brushwood, grasses, reeds, vines, etc.; an almost impenetrable thicket of trees, canes, and reedy vegetation, as in India, Africa, Australia, and Brazil. [Hind. jangal desert, forest, jungle; Skr. ja desert.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Nude Young Dancer is in the public domain. This text is taken from The weary blues, Project Gutenberg ebook #74745; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Langston Hughes, Nude Young Dancer, in The Weary Blues (1926), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #74745, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/hughes-weary-blues/nude-young-dancer.html, id L01497.
Form and metre
Nude Young Dancer is 8 lines in 2 stanzas of 4 lines each. The metre is trochaic pentameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 77%). 100% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 9.1 syllables. 3 lines end on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending. 12% of the lines run on without a stop at the line end.
See other poems in trochaic pentameter.
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 -A-A under · hourA · perfume · bowerA
- 2 -A-A under · hipsA · mother · lipsA
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 pentameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| What jungle tree have you slept under, | 9 | ·/˘······ |
| Midnight dancer of the jazzy hour? | 10 | /·/˘··/˘/˘ |
| What great forest has hung its perfume | 9 | ··/˘···˘/ |
| Like a sweet veil about your bower? | 9 | ·······/˘ |
| What jungle tree have you slept under, | 9 | ·/˘······ |
| Night-dark girl of the swaying hips? | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| What star-white moon has been your mother? | 9 | ·······/˘ |
| To what clean boy have you offered your lips? | 10 | ······/˘·· |
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.