The Days of the Month
Thirty days hath September,April, June, and November;February has twenty-eight alone.All the rest have thirty-one,Excepting leap-year--that’s the timeWhen February’s days are twenty-nine.
About this text
The Days of the Month 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, The Days of the Month, in Poems Every Child Should Know (1904), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #16436, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/poems-every-child/the-days-of-the-month.html, id L25159.
Form and metre
The Days of the Month is 6 lines in a single stanza. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 86%).
See other poems in iambic tetrameter.
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---- septemberA · novemberA · alone · one · time · nine
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 iambic tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Thirty days hath September, | 7 | /···˘/˘ |
| April, June, and November; | 7 | /˘··˘/˘ |
| February has twenty-eight alone. | 10 | /˘·˘·/˘·˘/ |
| All the rest have thirty-one, | 7 | ····/˘· |
| Excepting leap-year--that’s the time | 8 | ·/˘····· |
| When February’s days are twenty-nine. | 10 | ·/˘·˘··/˘· |
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.