Daffodowndilly
She wore her yellow sun-bonnet,She wore her greenest gown;She turned to the south windAnd curtsied up and down.She turned to the sunlightAnd shook her yellow head,And whispered to her neighbour:“Winter is dead.”
Words in this poem
- shook v. t.
- To pack, as staves, in a shook.
- neighbour v. i.
- To dwell in the vicinity; to be a neighbor, or in the neighborhood; to be near.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Daffodowndilly is in the public domain. This text is taken from When We Were Very Young, Project Gutenberg ebook #70271; 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, Daffodowndilly, in When We Were Very Young (1924), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #70271, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/milne-when-we-were-very-young/daffodowndilly.html, id L27187.
Form and metre
Daffodowndilly is 8 lines in a single stanza. The metre is iambic trimeter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 86%).
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 AB-BAC-C bonnetA · gownB · wind · downB · sunlightA · headC · neighbour · deadC
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 |
|---|---|---|
| She wore her yellow sun-bonnet, | 8 | ···/˘·/˘ |
| She wore her greenest gown; | 6 | ···/˘· |
| She turned to the south wind | 6 | ······ |
| And curtsied up and down. | 5 | ····· |
| She turned to the sunlight | 6 | ····/· |
| And shook her yellow head, | 6 | ···/˘· |
| And whispered to her neighbour: | 7 | ·/˘··/˘ |
| “Winter is dead.” | 4 | /˘·· |
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.