A Pig’s-Eye View of Literature: Charles Dickens
Who call him spurious and shoddyShall do it o’er my lifeless body.I heartily invite such birdsTo come outside and say those words!
Words in this poem
- shall v. i.
- To owe; to be under obligation for. [OE. shal, schal, imp. sholde, scholde, AS. scal, sceal, I am obliged, imp. scolde, sceolde, inf. sculan; akin to OS. skulan, pres. skal, imp. skolda, D. zullen,]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
A Pig’s-Eye View of Literature: Charles Dickens 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, A Pig’s-Eye View of Literature: Charles Dickens, in Sunset Gun (1928), text of English Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/parker-sunset-gun/pigs-eye-charles-dickens.html, id L27427.
Form and metre
A Pig’s-Eye View of Literature: Charles Dickens is 4 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets.
See other poems in rhyming couplets.
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 AABB shoddyA · bodyA · birdsB · wordsB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Who call him spurious and shoddy | 9 | ···/˘˘·/˘ |
| Shall do it o’er my lifeless body. | 9 | ·····/˘/˘ |
| I heartily invite such birds | 8 | ·/˘˘˘/·· |
| To come outside and say those words! | 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.