Epitaph on the Politician Himself
Here richly, with ridiculous display,The Politician’s corpse was laid away.While all of his acquaintance sneered and slangedI wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.
Words in this poem
- corpse n.
- A human body in general, whether living or dead; -- sometimes contemptuosly. [OF. cors (sometimes written corps), F. corps, L. corpus; akin to AS. hrif womb. See Midriff, and cf. Corse, Corselet, Corps, Cuerpo.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Epitaph on the Politician Himself 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, Epitaph on the Politician Himself, in Sonnets and Verse (1923), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #60663, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/belloc-sonnets-verse/epitaph-on-the-politician-himself.html, id L21718.
Form and metre
Epitaph on the Politician Himself is 4 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets: octosyllabic couplets. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic tetrameter.
See other poems in octosyllabic couplets, 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 AABB displayA · awayA · slangedB · hangedB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Here richly, with ridiculous display, | 9 | ·/˘·˘/˘˘/ |
| The Politician’s corpse was laid away. | 10 | ··˘/˘···˘/ |
| While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged | 10 | ····˘/˘··· |
| I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged. | 10 | ·········· |
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.