Reminiscent Song
Now you are dear to me,Now my beloved.You are the one that I did not take.Even then,When my body was young,When the sweetness of you made me drunk,You are the one that I did not take.
All that is old came into me,That night by the bush and the stairs in the dark.Yours were the lips I did not kiss,Yours the love that I kept.
Long and long I have walked alone,Past the cornfields and over the bridge,Sucking the sweetness out of nights,Dreaming things that have made me oldAnd young,Since that night.
Faring away down a lonely roadNow you must go, my beloved,Thinking your thoughts in the bitter nights,You that I loved and did not take.
About this text
Reminiscent Song is in the public domain. This text is taken from Mid-American Chants (New York: John Lane Company; London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1918), Internet Archive; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Sherwood Anderson, Reminiscent Song, in Mid-American Chants (1918), text of Internet Archive, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/anderson-mid-american-chants/reminiscent-song.html, id L29498.
Form and metre
Reminiscent Song is 21 lines in 4 stanzas. The metre is trochaic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 75%).
See other poems in trochaic tetrameter.
Measured by Laurel's pipeline, not copied from a handbook: how stress and metre are counted, how rhyme is lettered, how a drifted rhyme is found. Where the dictionary cannot confirm a rhyme the letter is withheld, not guessed.
Rhyme words, stanza by stanza
The word that ends each line, lettered by the rhyme it makes; a dash is a line whose rhyme the dictionary could not confirm.
- 1 --A---A me · beloved · takeA · then · young · drunk · takeA
Scansion, line by line
Each line with its syllable count and the stresses the words themselves fix: / stressed, ˘ unstressed, · a syllable the word leaves free and the metre decides. Read against trochaic tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Now you are dear to me, | 6 | ······ |
| Now my beloved. | 4 | ··˘/ |
| You are the one that I did not take. | 9 | ········· |
| Even then, | 3 | /˘· |
| When my body was young, | 6 | ··/˘·· |
| When the sweetness of you made me drunk, | 9 | ··/˘····· |
| You are the one that I did not take. | 9 | ········· |
| All that is old came into me, | 8 | ········ |
| That night by the bush and the stairs in the dark. | 11 | ··········· |
| Yours were the lips I did not kiss, | 8 | ········ |
| Yours the love that I kept. | 6 | ······ |
| Long and long I have walked alone, | 8 | ······˘/ |
| Past the cornfields and over the bridge, | 9 | ··//····· |
| Sucking the sweetness out of nights, | 8 | /˘·/˘··· |
| Dreaming things that have made me old | 8 | /˘······ |
| And young, | 2 | ·· |
| Since that night. | 3 | ··· |
| Faring away down a lonely road | 9 | /˘˘/··/˘· |
| Now you must go, my beloved, | 7 | ·····˘/ |
| Thinking your thoughts in the bitter nights, | 9 | /˘····/˘· |
| You that I loved and did not take. | 8 | ········ |
The reader shows the same poem with its rhymes coloured and a stress row above each line, the notes beside their stanzas, and any word's definition on a tap; the analysis page takes the whole book apart. How every part of this site was made.