If you’d never been born, well then what would you do? If you’d never been born, well then what would you be? You might be a fish! Or a toad in a tree!
You might be a doorknob! Or three baked potatoes!
You might be a bag full of hard green tomatoes.
Or worse than all that . . . Why, you might be a WASN’T! A Wasn’t has no fun at all. No, he doesn’t.
A Wasn’t just isn’t. He just isn’t present.
But you . . . You ARE YOU! And, now isn’t that pleasant!
Had twenty-three sons and she named them all Dave? Well, she did. And that wasn’t a smart thing to do. You see, when she wants one and calls out, “Yoo-Hoo!
5 Come into the house, Dave!” she doesn’t get one. All twenty-three Daves of hers come on the run! This makes things quite difficult at the McCaves’ As you can imagine, with so many Daves.
And often she wishes that, when they were born, 10 She had named one of them Bodkin Van Horn
And one of them Hoos-Foos. And one of them Snimm. And one of them Hot-Shot. And one Sunny Jim.
And one of them Shadrack. And one of them Blinkey. And one of them Stuffy. And one of them Stinkey.
15 Another one Putt-Putt. Another one Moon Face. Another one Marvin O’Gravel Balloon Face. And one of them Ziggy. And one Soggy Muff. One Buffalo Bill. And one Biffalo Buff.
And one of them Sneepy. And one Weepy Weed. 20 And one Paris Garters. And one Harris Tweed. And one of them Sir Michael Carmichael Zutt
And one of them Oliver Boliver Butt
And one of them Zanzibar Buck-Buck McFate . . . But she didn’t do it. And now it’s too late.
QUIZ
Terms to know:
Tone: attitude the speaker has toward the subject Rhyme: repeated sound at the ends of words
Rhythm: musiclike pattern of stressed and unstressed sounds in lines of a poem
A. Choose the correct response to each item.
1. What is unusual about the following line from “If We Didn’t Have Birthdays”? “A Wasn’t has no fun at all.”
A It ends with a period when it should end with a question mark.
B The verb does not agree with the subject.
C The word wasn’t is used as a proper noun rather than a verb.
D It does not express a complete thought.
2. How would you describe the pattern of rhyme in “Too Many Daves”?
F Every two lines end in a rhyme.
G Two words in every line rhyme.
H Every line ends with a word that rhymes.
J The end words in every other line rhyme.
3. How many stressed (accented) syllables are pronounced in the following line from “Too Many Daves” to create rhythm? “Did I ever tell you that Mrs. McCave”
A three
B four
C five
D six
B. Choose one poem, and describe Dr. Seuss’s tone—his attitude toward his subject.
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