Analysis of The Poet And The Baby

Paul Laurence Dunbar 1872 (Dayton) – 1906



How's a man to write a sonnet, can you tell,--
How's he going to weave the dim, poetic spell,--
When a-toddling on the floor
Is the muse he must adore,
And this muse he loves, not wisely, but too well?

Now, to write a sonnet, every one allows,
One must always be as quiet as a mouse;
But to write one seems to me
Quite superfluous to be,
When you 've got a little sonnet in the house.

Just a dainty little poem, true and fine,
That is full of love and life in every line,
Earnest, delicate, and sweet,
Altogether so complete
That I wonder what's the use of writing mine.


Scheme AABBA XCDDC EEFFE
Poetic Form Tetractys  (20%)
Metre 10111010111 111011010101 1010101 1011101 01111110111 111010100101 1111110101 1111111 11011 111101010001 10101010101 111110101001 1010001 010101 11101011101
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 564
Words 116
Sentences 4
Stanzas 3
Stanza Lengths 5, 5, 5
Lines Amount 15
Letters per line (avg) 29
Words per line (avg) 7
Letters per stanza (avg) 143
Words per stanza (avg) 37
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

35 sec read
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Paul Laurence Dunbar

Paul Laurence Dunbar was a seminal American poet of the late 19th and early 20th centuries Dunbar gained national recognition for his 1896 Lyrics of a Lowly Life one poem in the collection being Ode to Ethiopia more…

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