Captain Science wrote this little ditty today as an exercise in iambs and spondees.
I go into the kitchen
To get some pretzel sticks
And how much pretzels do I get
Well, nine’s how much I pick.
He didn’t quite integrate his understanding of the spondee into his poetic meter, but he’s getting there. He can explain it just fine, but since he’s only nine and still occasionally emphasizes words oddly in conversation, I don’t expect his usage to be perfect yet. We discussed that “many,” not “much,” would be grammatically correct here. He rewrote it to conserve the iambic rhythm and to try to use the spondee correctly. “Many” in the last line is intended to be the spondee, and when he reads the poem aloud, he stresses both syllables of “many.”
I go into the kitchen
To get some pretzel sticks
How many pretzels do I get?
Well, nine’s how many I pick.
