Autobiography
Oh, both my shoes are shiny new,And pristine is my hat;My dress is 1922....My life is all like that.
Words in this poem
- shiny a.
- Bright; luminous; clear; unclouded.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Autobiography is in the public domain. This text is taken from Enough Rope: Poems, Project Gutenberg ebook #68353; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Dorothy Parker, Autobiography, in Enough Rope (1926), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #68353, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/parker-enough-rope/autobiography.html, id L27394.
Form and metre
Autobiography is 4 lines in a single stanza.
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 new · hatA · — · thatA
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. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Oh, both my shoes are shiny new, | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| And pristine is my hat; | 6 | ·/˘··· |
| My dress is 1922.... | 3 | ··· |
| My life is all like that. | 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.