Analysis of Cats Cradle Song, by a Babe in Knots
James Clerk Maxwell 1831 (Edinburgh, Scotland) – 1879 (Cambridge, England)
Peter the Repeater,
Platted round a platter
Slips of slivered paper,
Basting them with batter.
Flype ’em, slit ’em, twist ’em,
Lop-looped laps of paper;
Setting out the system
By the bones of Neper.
Clear your coil of kinkings
Into perfect plaiting,
Locking loops and linkings
Interpenetrating.
Why should a man benighted,
Beduped, befooled, besotted,
Call knotful knittings plighted,
Not knotty but beknotted?
It’s monstrous, horrid, shocking,
Beyond the power of thinking,
Not to know, interlocking
Is no mere form of linking.
But little Jacky Horner
Will teach you what is proper,
So pitch him, in his corner,
Your silver and your copper.
Scheme | AAAA XAXA BCBC DDDD CCCC AAAA |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Quatrain |
Metre | 100010 11010 11110 101110 111111 111110 101010 10111 11111 010110 10101 1 1101010 111 1111 11011 1101010 01010110 111100 1111110 1101010 1111110 1110110 1100110 |
Closest metre | Iambic trimeter |
Characters | 634 |
Words | 105 |
Sentences | 7 |
Stanzas | 6 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4 |
Lines Amount | 24 |
Letters per line (avg) | 21 |
Words per line (avg) | 4 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 85 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 17 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 08, 2023
- 31 sec read
- 102 Views
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"Cats Cradle Song, by a Babe in Knots" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 25 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/20054/cats-cradle-song%2C-by-a-babe-in-knots>.
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