The Boys' Candidate
Las' time 'at Uncle Sidney come,He bringed a watermelon home--An' half the boys in town,Come taggin' after him.--An' heSays, when we et it,--"Gracious me!'S the boy-house fell down?"
Words in this poem
- watermelon n.
- The very large ovoid or roundish fruit of a cucurbitaceous plant (Citrullus vulgaris) of many varieties; also, the plant itself.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
The Boys' Candidate is in the public domain. This text is taken from Riley Child-Rhymes, Project Gutenberg ebook #9777; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: James Whitcomb Riley, The Boys' Candidate, in Riley Child-Rhymes (1890), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #9777, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/riley-child-rhymes/the-boys-candidate.html, id L25061.
Form and metre
The Boys' Candidate is 6 lines in a single stanza. It rhymes AABCCB. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 89%).
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 AABCCB comeA · homeA · townB · heC · meC · downB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Las' time 'at Uncle Sidney come, | 8 | ···/˘/˘· |
| He bringed a watermelon home-- | 8 | ···/˘·˘· |
| An' half the boys in town, | 6 | ······ |
| Come taggin' after him.--An' he | 8 | ········ |
| Says, when we et it,--"Gracious me! | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| 'S the boy-house fell down?" | 6 | ······ |
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.