The Little Lady of Ch’Ing-Hsi (A Children’s Song)
Her door opened on the white waterClose by the side of the timber bridge:That’s where the little lady livedAll alone without a lover.
About this text
The Little Lady of Ch’Ing-Hsi (A Children’s Song) is in the public domain. This text is taken from A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems, Project Gutenberg ebook #42290, the Arthur Waley translation; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Various, The Little Lady of Ch’Ing-Hsi (A Children’s Song), in A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #42290, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/waley-chinese/the-little-lady-of-ch-ing-hsi-a-children-s-song.html, id L18794.
Form and metre
The Little Lady of Ch’Ing-Hsi (A Children’s Song) is 4 lines in a single stanza. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic tetrameter. 88% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 8.5 syllables. 2 lines end on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending.
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.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Her door opened on the white water | 9 | ··/˘···/˘ |
| Close by the side of the timber bridge: | 9 | ······/˘· |
| That’s where the little lady lived | 8 | ···/˘/˘· |
| All alone without a lover. | 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.