Envoi
Prince, have you ever learnt to prayUpon your knees beside your bed?You miserable waxwork? Nay!But where are the unanswering dead?
Words in this poem
- waxwork n.
- Work made of wax; especially, a figure or figures formed or partly of wax, in imitation of real beings.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Envoi is in the public domain. This text is taken from Sonnets and Verse, Project Gutenberg ebook #60663; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Hilaire Belloc, Envoi, in Sonnets and Verse (1923), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #60663, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/belloc-sonnets-verse/envoi-3.html, id L21700.
Form and metre
Envoi is 4 lines in a single stanza. It rhymes ABAB. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic tetrameter.
See other poems in iambic 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 ABAB prayA · bedB · nayA · deadB
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 iambic tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Prince, have you ever learnt to pray | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| Upon your knees beside your bed? | 8 | ····˘/·· |
| You miserable waxwork? Nay! | 8 | ·/˘˘˘/˘· |
| But where are the unanswering dead? | 9 | ········· |
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.