Analysis of 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.


Scheme ABXB XCXC XDAD XEXE XFXF
Poetic Form Quatrain 
Metre 11111101 011101 01110001 011101 01110001 010101 1010100 111101 0101111 010101 10010111 011101 01110101 110101 11110101 011111 010011101 011101 1111111 011111
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 596
Words 121
Sentences 3
Stanzas 5
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4, 4, 4
Lines Amount 20
Letters per line (avg) 23
Words per line (avg) 6
Letters per stanza (avg) 92
Words per stanza (avg) 23
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 28, 2023

36 sec read
142

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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