Daylight Saving
My answers are inadequateTo those demanding day and date,And ever set a tiny shockThrough strangers asking what’s o’clock;Whose days are spent in whittling rhyme—What’s time to her, or she to Time?
About this text
Daylight Saving is in the public domain. This text is taken from Sunset Gun: Poems (Boni & Liveright, 1928), English Wikisource; 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, Daylight Saving, in Sunset Gun (1928), text of English Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/parker-sunset-gun/daylight-saving.html, id L27442.
Form and metre
Daylight Saving is 6 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets: octosyllabic couplets. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 93%).
See other poems in octosyllabic couplets, other poems in iambic tetrameter.
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 AABBCC inadequateA · dateA · shockB · o'clockB · rhymeC · timeC
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 tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| My answers are inadequate | 8 | ·/˘·˘/˘· |
| To those demanding day and date, | 8 | ··˘/˘··· |
| And ever set a tiny shock | 8 | ·/˘··/˘· |
| Through strangers asking what’s o’clock; | 8 | ·/˘/˘·˘/ |
| Whose days are spent in whittling rhyme— | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| What’s time to her, or she to Time? | 8 | ········ |
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.