A Pig’s-Eye View of Literature: Thomas Carlyle
Carlyle combined the lit’ry lifeWith throwing teacups at his wife,Remarking, rather testily,“Oh, stop your dodging, Mrs. C.!”
About this text
A Pig’s-Eye View of Literature: Thomas Carlyle 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: Thomas Carlyle, in Sunset Gun (1928), text of English Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/parker-sunset-gun/pigs-eye-thomas-carlyle.html, id L27426.
Form and metre
A Pig’s-Eye View of Literature: Thomas Carlyle is 4 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets, 50% of the lines.
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 AA-- lifeA · wifeA · testily · c
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Carlyle combined the lit’ry life | 8 | /·˘/···· |
| With throwing teacups at his wife, | 8 | ·/˘/···· |
| Remarking, rather testily, | 8 | ˘/˘/˘/˘˘ |
| “Oh, stop your dodging, Mrs. C.!” | 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.