Little Things
Little drops of water,Little grains of sand,Make the mighty oceanAnd the pleasant land.
Thus the little minutes,Humble though they be,Make the mighty agesOf eternity.
About this text
Little Things is in the public domain. This text is taken from Poems Every Child Should Know The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library, Project Gutenberg ebook #16436; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Mary E. Burt, Little Things, in Poems Every Child Should Know (1904), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #16436, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/poems-every-child/little-things.html, id L25155.
Form and metre
Little Things is 8 lines in 2 stanzas of 4 lines each. The metre is trochaic trimeter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 97%).
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 -A-A water · sandA · ocean · landA
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Little drops of water, | 6 | /˘··/˘ |
| Little grains of sand, | 5 | /˘··· |
| Make the mighty ocean | 6 | ··/˘/˘ |
| And the pleasant land. | 5 | ··/˘· |
| Thus the little minutes, | 6 | ··/˘/˘ |
| Humble though they be, | 5 | /˘··· |
| Make the mighty ages | 6 | ··/˘/˘ |
| Of eternity. | 5 | ·˘/˘˘ |
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.