Our April 15 poem-a-day honors those of you who got your taxes finished on time this year! Excellent work.
Money
Workers earn it,
Spendthrifts burn it,
Bankers lend it,
Women spend it,
Forgers fake it,
Taxes take it,
Dying leave it,
Heirs receive it,
Misers crave it,
Robbers seize it,
Rich increase it,
Gamblers lose it…
I could use it.
■
Workers earn it,
Spendthrifts burn it,
Bankers lend it,
Women spend it,
Forgers fake it,
Taxes take it,
Dying leave it,
Heirs receive it,
Misers crave it,
Robbers seize it,
Rich increase it,
Gamblers lose it…
I could use it.
■
Richard Armour’s “Money” is an example of trochaic dimeter.
Trochaic dimeter sounds real fancy, but I’m gonna break it down for you:
Meter is just the word for how we talk about the rhythm of a poem, particularly when there is a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables.
The unit of measurement for meter is the foot — which just means a group of two syllables.
A trochee is just a particular kind of foot, wherein the stressed syllable comes first followed by an unstressed syllable (AKA the opposite of an iamb).
The adjective form of trochee is trochaic.
Sooooo…. all trochaic dimeter means is that this poem follows a meter wherein each line consists of two feet that are both trochees — or four syllables total, following the pattern: stressed, unstressed, stressed, unstressed. Ta-da!
— Ellen
P.S. If you’ve been on this poem-a-day list a long time, this poem may be vaguely familiar because it was also featured for Poem-A-Day April 8, 2012.