A Ballad Of Abbreviations Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: AAAABBBB CBCBCBCB CDCDBBBB EFEFEGEG| The American's a hustler for he says so | A |
| And surely the American must know | A |
| He will prove to you with figures why it pays so | A |
| Beginning with his boyhood long ago | A |
| When the slow maturing anecdote is ripest | B |
| He'll dictate it like a Board of Trade Report | B |
| And because he has no time to call a typist | B |
| He calls her a Stenographer for short | B |
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| He is never known to loiter or malinger | C |
| He rushes for he knows he has 'a date' | B |
| He is always on the spot and full of ginger | C |
| Which is why he is invariably late | B |
| When he guesses that it's getting even later | C |
| His vocabulary's vehement and swift | B |
| And he yells for what he calls the Elevator | C |
| A slang abbreviation for a lift | B |
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| Then nothing can be nattier or nicer | C |
| For those who like a light and rapid style | D |
| Than to trifle with a work of Mr Dreiser | C |
| As it comes along in waggons by the mile | D |
| He has taught us what a swift selective art meant | B |
| By description of his dinners and all that | B |
| And his dwelling which he says is an Apartment | B |
| Because he cannot stop to say a flat | B |
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| We may whisper of his wild precipitation | E |
| That it's speed in rather longer than a span | F |
| But there really is a definite occasion | E |
| When he does not use the longest word he can | F |
| When he substitutes I freely make admission | E |
| One shorter and much easier to spell | G |
| If you ask him what he thinks of Prohibition | E |
| He may tell you quite succinctly it is Hell | G |
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
(1)
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