Superfluous Advice
Should they whisper false of you,Never trouble to deny;Should the words they say be true,Weep and storm and swear they lie.
About this text
Superfluous Advice 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, Superfluous Advice, in Sunset Gun (1928), text of English Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/parker-sunset-gun/superfluous-advice.html, id L27466.
Form and metre
Superfluous Advice is 4 lines in a single stanza. It rhymes ABAB.
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 ABAB youA · denyB · trueA · lieB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Should they whisper false of you, | 7 | ··/˘··· |
| Never trouble to deny; | 7 | /˘/˘·˘/ |
| Should the words they say be true, | 7 | ······· |
| Weep and storm and swear they lie. | 7 | ······· |
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.