Analysis of A Game of Fives

Lewis Carroll 1832 (Daresbury) – 1898 (Guildford)



Five little girls, of Five, Four, Three, Two, One:
Rolling on the hearthrug, full of tricks and fun.

Five rosy girls, in years from Ten to Six:
Sitting down to lessons - no more time for tricks.

Five growing girls, from Fifteen to Eleven:
Music, Drawing, Languages, and food enough for seven!

Five winsome girls, from Twenty to Sixteen:
Each young man that calls, I say "Now tell me which you MEAN!"

Five dashing girls, the youngest Twenty-one:
But, if nobody proposes, what is there to be done?

Five showy girls - but Thirty is an age
When girls may be ENGAGING, but they somehow don't ENGAGE.

Five dressy girls, of Thirty-one or more:
So gracious to the shy young men they snubbed so much before!

Five PASSE girls - Their age? Well, never mind!
We jog along together, like the rest of human kind:
But the quondam "careless bachelor" begins to think he knows
The answer to that ancient problem "how the money goes"!


Scheme AA BB AA CC AA DD EE FFGG
Poetic Form
Metre 1101111111 1010111101 1101011111 10111011111 11011011010 10101000101110 1101110101 1111111111111 1101010101 111010111111 1101110111 1111010111101 1101110111 11010111111101 111111101 11010101011101 10110100011111 01011101010101
Closest metre Iambic hexameter
Characters 914
Words 168
Sentences 11
Stanzas 8
Stanza Lengths 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 4
Lines Amount 18
Letters per line (avg) 39
Words per line (avg) 9
Letters per stanza (avg) 88
Words per stanza (avg) 21
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 11, 2023

50 sec read
165

Lewis Carroll

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by his pen name, Lewis Carroll, was an English writer, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. more…

All Lewis Carroll poems | Lewis Carroll Books

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