There was an Old Man of Whitehaven
There was an Old Man of Whitehaven,Who danced a quadrille with a Raven;But they said, "It's absurd to encourage this bird!"So they smashed that Old Man of Whitehaven.
Words in this poem
- quadrille n.
- A dance having five figures, in common time, four couples of dancers being in each set. [F. quadrille, n. fem., fr. Sp. cuadrilla meeting of four or more persons or It. quadriglia a band of soldiers, a sort of dance; dim. fr. L. quadra a square, fr.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
There was an Old Man of Whitehaven 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 Whitehaven, 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-whitehaven.html, id L18190.
Form and metre
There was an Old Man of Whitehaven 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. 78% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 10.5 syllables. 1 line ends 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 whitehavenA · raven · bird · whitehavenA
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 Whitehaven, | 10 | ·········· |
| Who danced a quadrille with a Raven; | 9 | ···˘/··/˘ |
| But they said, "It's absurd to encourage this bird!" | 12 | ····˘/·˘/˘·· |
| So they smashed that Old Man of Whitehaven. | 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.