Verses Made for Fruit-Women: Apples
Come buy my fine wares,Plums, apples, and pears.A hundred a penny,In conscience too many:Come, will you have any?My children are seven,I wish them in Heaven;My husband a sot,With his pipe and his pot,Not a farthing will gain them,And I must maintain them.
Words in this poem
- conscience n.
- Knowledge of one's own thoughts or actions; consciousness. [F. conscience, fr. L. conscientia, fr. consciens, p.pr. of conscire to know, to be conscious; con- + scire to know. See Science.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Verses Made for Fruit-Women: Apples 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, Verses Made for Fruit-Women: Apples, in On Poetry: A Rhapsody, and Other Poems (1727), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #14353, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/swift-poems-vol1/verses-made-for-fruit-women-apples.html, id L24578.
Form and metre
Verses Made for Fruit-Women: Apples is 11 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets, 55% of the lines. The metre is anapaestic dimeter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 85%).
See other poems in rhyming couplets, other poems in anapaestic dimeter.
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 AABBBCC--DD waresA · pearsA · pennyB · manyB · anyB · sevenC · heavenC · sot · pot · themD · themD
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 anapaestic dimeter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Come buy my fine wares, | 5 | ····· |
| Plums, apples, and pears. | 5 | ·/˘·· |
| A hundred a penny, | 6 | ·/˘·/˘ |
| In conscience too many: | 6 | ·/˘·/˘ |
| Come, will you have any? | 6 | ····/˘ |
| My children are seven, | 6 | ·/˘·/˘ |
| I wish them in Heaven; | 6 | ····/˘ |
| My husband a sot, | 5 | ·/˘·· |
| With his pipe and his pot, | 6 | ······ |
| Not a farthing will gain them, | 7 | ··/˘··· |
| And I must maintain them. | 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.