Oranges
Come buy my fine oranges, sauce for your veal,And charming, when squeezed in a pot of brown ale;Well roasted, with sugar and wine in a cup,They'll make a sweet bishop when gentlefolks sup.
Words in this poem
- gentlefolks n.
- Persons of gentle or good family and breeding. Etym: [Generally in the United States in the plural form.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Oranges is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume 1, Project Gutenberg ebook #14353; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Jonathan Swift, Oranges, in On Poetry: A Rhapsody, and Other Poems (1727), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #14353, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/swift-poems-vol1/oranges.html, id L24583.
Form and metre
Oranges is 4 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets, 50% of the lines: heroic couplets. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic pentameter.
See other poems in heroic couplets, other poems in iambic pentameter.
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 veal · ale · cupA · supA
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 pentameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Come buy my fine oranges, sauce for your veal, | 10 | ····/˘···· |
| And charming, when squeezed in a pot of brown ale; | 11 | ·/˘········ |
| Well roasted, with sugar and wine in a cup, | 11 | ·/˘·/˘····· |
| They'll make a sweet bishop when gentlefolks sup. | 11 | ····/˘····· |
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.