Solitude
I have a house where I goWhen there's too many people,I have a house where I goWhere no one can be;I have a house where I go,Where nobody ever says "No";Where no one says anything—soThere is no one but me.
Words in this poem
- nobody n.
- No person; no one; not anybody. [No, a. + body.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Solitude is in the public domain. This text is taken from Now We Are Six, Project Gutenberg ebook #70516; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: A. A. Milne, Solitude, in Now We Are Six (1927), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #70516, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/milne-now-we-are-six/solitude.html, id L27219.
Form and metre
Solitude is 8 lines in a single stanza. The metre is iambic trimeter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 83%).
See other poems in iambic 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-ABAAAB goA · people · goA · beB · goA · noA · soA · meB
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 iambic trimeter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| I have a house where I go | 7 | ······· |
| When there's too many people, | 7 | ···/˘/˘ |
| I have a house where I go | 7 | ······· |
| Where no one can be; | 5 | ····· |
| I have a house where I go, | 7 | ······· |
| Where nobody ever says "No"; | 7 | ·/··/·· |
| Where no one says anything—so | 8 | ····/˘·· |
| There is no one but me. | 6 | ······ |
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.