There was an Old Person of Chili
There was an Old Person of Chili,Whose conduct was painful and silly;He sate on the stairs, eating apples and pears,That imprudent Old Person of Chili.
Words in this poem
- sate v. t.
- To satisfy the desire or appetite of; to satiate; to glut; to surfeit. [Probably shortened fr. satiate: cf. L. satus full. See Satiate.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
There was an Old Person of Chili 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 Person of Chili, in A Book of Nonsense (1846), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #13646, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/lear-nonsense/there-was-an-old-person-of-chili.html, id L18111.
Form and metre
There was an Old Person of Chili is 4 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets, 50% of the lines. 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 9.8 syllables. 3 lines end on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending.
See other poems in rhyming couplets, 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 AA-A chiliA · sillyA · pears · chiliA
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 Person of Chili, | 9 | ····/˘·/˘ |
| Whose conduct was painful and silly; | 9 | ·˘/·/˘·/˘ |
| He sate on the stairs, eating apples and pears, | 11 | ·····/˘/˘·· |
| That imprudent Old Person of Chili. | 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.