There was an Old Man of Marseilles
There was an Old Man of Marseilles,Whose daughters wore bottle-green veils:They caught several Fish, which they put in a dish,And sent to their Pa at Marseilles.
About this text
There was an Old Man of Marseilles 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 an Old Man of Marseilles, in A Book of Nonsense (1846), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #13646, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/lear-nonsense/there-was-an-old-man-of-marseilles.html, id L18135.
Form and metre
There was an Old Man of Marseilles 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. 88% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 9.2 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 marseillesA · veils · dish · marseillesA
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 an Old Man of Marseilles, | 9 | ······˘/˘ |
| Whose daughters wore bottle-green veils: | 8 | ·/˘·/˘·· |
| They caught several Fish, which they put in a dish, | 11 | ··/˘······· |
| And sent to their Pa at Marseilles. | 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.