Envoi
Prince, on their iron thrones they sit,Impassible to our despair,The dreadful Guardians of the Pit:--And Mrs Roebeck will be there.
Words in this poem
- impassible a.
- Incapable of suffering; inaccessible to harm or pain; not to be touched or moved to passion or sympathy; unfeeling, or not showing feeling; without sensation. [L. impassibilis; pref. im- not + passibilis passable: cf. F. impassible. See Passible.]
- dreadful a.
- Full of dread or terror; fearful.
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-5.html, id L21704.
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 sitA · despairB · pitA · thereB
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, on their iron thrones they sit, | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| Impassible to our despair, | 8 | ˘/˘˘·/˘/ |
| The dreadful Guardians of the Pit:-- | 8 | ·/˘/˘··· |
| And Mrs Roebeck will be there. | 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.