On Cheating the Fiddler
“Then we will have to-night!” we said.“To-morrow—may we not be dead?”The morrow touched our eyes; and foundUs walking firm above the ground,Our pulses quick, our blood alight.To-morrow’s gone—we’ll have to-night!
About this text
On Cheating the Fiddler 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, On Cheating the Fiddler, in Sunset Gun (1928), text of English Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/parker-sunset-gun/on-cheating-the-fiddler.html, id L27418.
Form and metre
On Cheating the Fiddler 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 95%).
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 saidA · deadA · foundB · groundB · alightC · nightC
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 |
|---|---|---|
| “Then we will have to-night!” we said. | 8 | ········ |
| “To-morrow—may we not be dead?” | 8 | ·/˘····· |
| The morrow touched our eyes; and found | 8 | ·/˘·/··· |
| Us walking firm above the ground, | 8 | ·/˘····· |
| Our pulses quick, our blood alight. | 8 | //˘·/·˘/ |
| To-morrow’s gone—we’ll have to-night! | 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.