On Lady Poltagrue, a Public Peril
The Devil, having nothing else to do,Went off to tempt My Lady Poltagrue.My Lady, tempted by a private whim,To his extreme annoyance, tempted him.
Words in this poem
- went n.
- Course; way; path; journey; direction.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
On Lady Poltagrue, a Public Peril 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, On Lady Poltagrue, a Public Peril, in Sonnets and Verse (1923), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #60663, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/belloc-sonnets-verse/on-lady-poltagrue-a-public-peril.html, id L21713.
Form and metre
On Lady Poltagrue, a Public Peril is 4 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets, 50% of the lines: 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 --AA do · poltagrue · whimA · himA
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 |
|---|---|---|
| The Devil, having nothing else to do, | 9 | ·//˘/˘··· |
| Went off to tempt My Lady Poltagrue. | 9 | ·····/˘·· |
| My Lady, tempted by a private whim, | 10 | ·/˘/˘··/˘· |
| To his extreme annoyance, tempted him. | 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.