The Plagues of a Country Life
A companion with news; a great want of shoes;Eat lean meat or choose; a church without pews;Our horses away; no straw, oats, or hay;December in May; our boys run away; all servants at play.
About this text
The Plagues of a Country Life is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume 2, Project Gutenberg ebook #13621; 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, The Plagues of a Country Life, in Cadenus and Vanessa, and Other Poems (1710–1745), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #13621, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/swift-poems/the-plagues-of-a-country-life.html, id L09425.
Form and metre
The Plagues of a Country Life is 4 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets: octosyllabic couplets. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic tetrameter. 95% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 9.1 syllables. 29 lines end on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending.
See other poems in octosyllabic couplets, 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 shoesA · pewsA · hayB · playB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| A companion with news; a great want of shoes; | 11 | ·˘/˘······· |
| Eat lean meat or choose; a church without pews; | 10 | ·········· |
| Our horses away; no straw, oats, or hay; | 10 | //˘˘/····· |
| December in May; our boys run away; all servants at play. | 15 | ˘/˘··/··˘/·/˘·· |
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.