Whole Duty of Children
A child should always say what's trueAnd speak when he is spoken to,And behave mannerly at table;At least as far as he is able.
Words in this poem
- mannerly a.
- Showing good manners; civil; respectful; complaisant.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Whole Duty of Children 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, Whole Duty of Children, in A Child's Garden of Verses (1885), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #136, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/stevenson-childs-garden/whole-duty-of-children.html, id L07177.
Form and metre
Whole Duty of Children is 4 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets. The lines average 8.5 syllables. 2 lines end on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending.
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 trueA · toA · tableB · ableB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| A child should always say what's true | 8 | ···/···· |
| And speak when he is spoken to, | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| And behave mannerly at table; | 9 | ·˘//˘˘·/˘ |
| At least as far as he is able. | 9 | ·······/˘ |
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.