Analysis of Only a Dancing Girl
William Schwenck Gilbert 1836 – 1911
Only a dancing girl,
With an unromantic style,
With borrowed colour and curl,
With fixed mechanical smile,
With many a hackneyed wile,
With ungrammatical lips,
And corns that mar her trips.
Hung from the "flies" in air,
She acts a palpable lie,
She's as little a fairy there
As unpoetical I!
I hear you asking, Why -
Why in the world I sing
This tawdry, tinselled thing?
No airy fairy she,
As she hangs in arsenic green
From a highly impossible tree
In a highly impossible scene
(Herself not over-clean).
For fays don't suffer, I'm told,
From bunions, coughs, or cold.
And stately dames that bring
Their daughters there to see,
Pronounce the "dancing thing"
No better than she should be,
With her skirt at her shameful knee,
And her painted, tainted phiz:
Ah, matron, which of us is?
(And, in sooth, it oft occurs
That while these matrons sigh,
Their dresses are lower than hers,
And sometimes half as high;
And their hair is hair they buy,
And they use their glasses, too,
In a way she'd blush to do.)
But change her gold and green
For a coarse merino gown,
And see her upon the scene
Of her home, when coaxing down
Her drunken father's frown,
In his squalid cheerless den:
She's a fairy truly, then!
| Scheme | ABABBCC DEDEEFF GHGHHII FGFGGCX JEJEEKK HLHLLMM |
|---|---|
| Poetic Form | |
| Metre | 100101 1111 11101 1101001 1100101 111 011101 110101 1101001 11100101 111 111101 100111 11011 110101 11101001 101001001 001001001 011101 1111011 11111 010111 110111 010101 1101111 10110101 0010101 1101111 0011101 111101 11011010 001111 0111111 0111101 0011111 110101 1010101 0100101 1011101 010101 011011 1010101 |
| Closest metre | Iambic trimeter |
| Characters | 1,168 |
| Words | 221 |
| Sentences | 9 |
| Stanzas | 6 |
| Stanza Lengths | 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7 |
| Lines Amount | 42 |
| Letters per line (avg) | 22 |
| Words per line (avg) | 5 |
| Letters per stanza (avg) | 154 |
| Words per stanza (avg) | 36 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:08 min read
- 64 Views
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