Hello there, Can any of the poetry peeps unravel this line of poetry for me into its meter and foot? 'Come sit by me child and I will tell you a story.' ?? COME sit BY me CHILD and I will TELL you A story? I have underlined the parts I might stress were I to try stress parts. So is that sentence a IAMB foot (BAH-bah)? And is it Iamb foot x 6 times? And so making it a Hexameter?? I am trying to develop my poetic skills and that is the first line I want to work with. I am trying to figure out the rhythm to go forward. If anybody were to add a line or verse to it as an example for the different patterns poems can take, that would be most excellent and greatly appreciated. ;-) Thanks Guys.
Given the word choice, my read is thus: Come sit by me child and I will tell you a story. Bah-dum-bum-bum-bah, bum-badum-bum-bum-badum. Reading it with the stresses you note feels very forced for this particular word choice.
@Wreybies Yes that is also how I would read it in a natural way but I was trying to fit it into my very limited, newly learned. paradigm of meters and feet. If you were to add a next natural sentence, if you don't mind me asking, what might you add to match the 'Bum-bum-bum-bum-bah, bum-badum-bum-bum-badum.' of that sentence? I know it is a organic thing and might take more than one sentence for the rhythm to be exposed to the reader but just for my own learning, what sentence do you think would sound good next?
Well, I'll preface by telling you that I'm not the man of whom Phoebe Snow crooned so beautifully in the 70's. My poetry tends to the Seussian. Come sit by my child and I will tell you a story of a King and his Queen in their realm filled of glory. The King, he was just, and the Queen, she was fair, and they ruled their great land from high in the air.
I am exactly the same with my peotry, Seussian all the way. When I wrote my first/only poem so far, the rhyming was simple AF, ridiculously cute and I was very pleased with it. ;-) But I see what you did there...and I've gotten the word vibe of what you've done. The next line of my poem/ weird literary device -needs to be something that explains... 'In the beginning, when humans first grew from the earth, they had four arms, four legs, two faces.' (It's Plato's split apart theory, hopefully artfully remixed to suit my needs) I will cheat and explicitly ask you folks reading this to add this concept to my original sentence of 'Come sit by me child and I will tell you a story.' in a way that you think works.
First, you have 13 syllables, not 12. Second, the stresses aren't right based on common usage (when in doubt, consult the pronunciations for words in a dictionary). I would stress it like this: Come sit by me child and I will tell you a story.
