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
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