Homage I
There is a light around your headWhich only Saints of God may wear,And all the flowers on which you treadIn pleasaunce more than ours have fed,And supped the essential airWhose summer is a-pulse with music everywhere.
About this text
Homage I 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, Homage I, in Sonnets and Verse (1923), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #60663, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/belloc-sonnets-verse/homage-i.html, id L21665.
Form and metre
Homage I is 6 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets, 67% of the lines: octosyllabic couplets. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 90%).
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 ABAABB headA · wearB · treadA · fedA · airB · everywhereB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| There is a light around your head | 8 | ········ |
| Which only Saints of God may wear, | 8 | ·/˘····· |
| And all the flowers on which you tread | 8 | ···/···· |
| In pleasaunce more than ours have fed, | 8 | ·····/·· |
| And supped the essential air | 8 | ··˘·˘/˘· |
| Whose summer is a-pulse with music everywhere. | 12 | ·/˘····/˘/˘· |
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.