There was a Young Person of Smyrna
There was a Young Person of Smyrna,Whose Grandmother threatened to burn her;But she seized on the Cat, and said, "Granny, burn that!You incongruous Old Woman of Smyrna!"
Words in this poem
- granny n.
- A grandmother; a grandam; familiarly, an old woman. Granny's bend, or Granny's knot (Naut.), a kind of insecure knot or hitch; a reef knot crossed the wrong way.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
There was a Young Person of Smyrna is in the public domain. This text is taken from A Book of Nonsense, Project Gutenberg ebook #13646; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Edward Lear, There was a Young Person of Smyrna, in A Book of Nonsense (1846), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #13646, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/lear-nonsense/there-was-a-young-person-of-smyrna.html, id L18109.
Form and metre
There was a Young Person of Smyrna is 4 lines in a single stanza. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in anapaestic trimeter. 72% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 10.2 syllables. 2 lines end on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending.
See other poems in anapaestic trimeter.
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 smyrnaA · her · that · smyrnaA
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 anapaestic trimeter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| There was a Young Person of Smyrna, | 9 | ····/˘·/˘ |
| Whose Grandmother threatened to burn her; | 9 | ·/·˘/˘··· |
| But she seized on the Cat, and said, "Granny, burn that! | 12 | ········/˘·· |
| You incongruous Old Woman of Smyrna!" | 11 | ·˘/˘˘·/˘·/˘ |
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.