System
Every night my prayers I say,And get my dinner every day;And every day that I've been good,I get an orange after food.
The child that is not clean and neat,With lots of toys and things to eat,He is a naughty child, I'm sure--Or else his dear papa is poor.
Words in this poem
- naughty a.
- Having little or nothing.
- 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
System 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, System, in A Child's Garden of Verses (1885), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #136, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/stevenson-childs-garden/system.html, id L07191.
Form and metre
System is 8 lines in 2 stanzas of 4 lines each. Every stanza rhymes AABB. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 90%). 96% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 8.0 syllables.
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 AABB sayA · dayA · goodB · foodB
- 2 AABB neatA · eatA · sureB · poorB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Every night my prayers I say, | 8 | /˘˘····· |
| And get my dinner every day; | 8 | ···/˘/˘· |
| And every day that I've been good, | 8 | ·/˘····· |
| I get an orange after food. | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| The child that is not clean and neat, | 8 | ········ |
| With lots of toys and things to eat, | 8 | ········ |
| He is a naughty child, I'm sure-- | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| Or else his dear papa is poor. | 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.