A Thought
It is very nice to thinkThe world is full of meat and drink,With little children saying graceIn every Christian kind of place.
About this text
A Thought is in the public domain. This text is taken from A Child's Garden of Verses, Project Gutenberg ebook #136; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Robert Louis Stevenson, A Thought, in A Child's Garden of Verses (1885), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #136, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/stevenson-childs-garden/a-thought.html, id L07174.
Form and metre
A Thought is 4 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets. The lines average 7.8 syllables.
See other poems in rhyming couplets.
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 AABB thinkA · drinkA · graceB · placeB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| It is very nice to think | 7 | ··/˘··· |
| The world is full of meat and drink, | 8 | ········ |
| With little children saying grace | 8 | ·/˘/˘/˘· |
| In every Christian kind of place. | 8 | ·/˘/˘··· |
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.