Verses in the Night (After an Evening Spent in Reading the Big Boys): Mélange for the Unknown George
George is a lion;There is no pope;Death is the scionOf the house of Hope.George is a gazelle;There is no Freud;Charles ParnellLooked like Ernest Boyd.George is a llama;There is no stork;Papa loves MamaLike Jews love pork.There’s no Frances Newman—In a pig’s right eye!Death is as humanAs a mandrake’s cry.George is a racoon; heInsists there is art.Little Annie RooneyIs my sweetheart.
Words in this poem
- papa n.
- A child's word for father. [F. papa, L. papa; cf. Gr. Pope.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Verses in the Night (After an Evening Spent in Reading the Big Boys): Mélange for the Unknown George 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, Verses in the Night (After an Evening Spent in Reading the Big Boys): Mélange for the Unknown George, in Sunset Gun (1928), text of English Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/parker-sunset-gun/verses-in-the-night-melange-for-the-unknown-george.html, id L27459.
Form and metre
Verses in the Night (After an Evening Spent in Reading the Big Boys): Mélange for the Unknown George is 20 lines in a single stanza. The metre is trochaic trimeter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 84%).
See other poems in trochaic trimeter.
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 ABABCDCDEFEFGHGHHI-I lionA · popeB · scionA · hopeB · gazelleC · freudD · parnellC · boydD · llamaE · storkF · mamaE · porkF · newmanG · eyeH · humanG · cryH · heH · artI · rooney · sweetheartI
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 trochaic trimeter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| George is a lion; | 5 | ···/˘ |
| There is no pope; | 4 | ···· |
| Death is the scion | 5 | ···/˘ |
| Of the house of Hope. | 5 | ····· |
| George is a gazelle; | 5 | ···˘/ |
| There is no Freud; | 4 | ···· |
| Charles Parnell | 3 | ·/˘ |
| Looked like Ernest Boyd. | 5 | ··/˘· |
| George is a llama; | 5 | ···/˘ |
| There is no stork; | 4 | ···· |
| Papa loves Mama | 5 | /˘·/˘ |
| Like Jews love pork. | 4 | ···· |
| There’s no Frances Newman— | 6 | ··/˘/˘ |
| In a pig’s right eye! | 5 | ····· |
| Death is as human | 5 | ···/˘ |
| As a mandrake’s cry. | 5 | ··/·· |
| George is a racoon; he | 6 | ······ |
| Insists there is art. | 5 | ˘/··· |
| Little Annie Rooney | 6 | /˘/˘/˘ |
| Is my sweetheart. | 4 | ··/· |
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.