A Joyful Song Of Five

Katherine Mansfield 1888 (Wellington) – 1923 (Fontainebleau, Île-de-France)



Come, let us all sing very high
And all sing very loud
And keep on singing in the street
Until there's quite a crowd;

And keep on singing in the house
And up and down the stairs;
Then underneath the furniture
Let's all play Polar bears;

And crawl about with doormats on,
And growl and howl and squeak,
Then in the garden let us fly
And play at hid and seek;

And "Here we gather Nuts and May,"
"I wrote a Letter" too,
"Here we go round the Mulberry Bush,"
"The Child who lost its shoe";

And every game we ever played.
And then--to stay alive--
Let's end with lots of Birthday Cake
Because to-day you're five.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 28, 2023

36 sec read
142

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABXB XCXC XDAD XEXE XFXF
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 596
Words 121
Stanzas 5
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4, 4, 4

Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp Murry was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. more…

All Katherine Mansfield poems | Katherine Mansfield Books

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