A Bequest to Music
"Let music flourish!" So he said and died.Hark! ere he's gone the minstrelsy begins:The symphonies ascend, a swelling tide,Melodious thunders fill the welkin wide--The grand old lawyers, chinning on their chins!
Words in this poem
- minstrelsy n.
- The arts and occupation of minstrels; the singing and playing of a minstrel.
- welkin n.
- The visible regions of the air; the vault of heaven; the sky. [OE. welken, welkene, welkne, wolcne, weolcne, AS. wolcen, pl. wolcnu, a cloud; akin to D. wolk, OFries. wolken, OS. wolkan, G. wolke, OHG. wolchan, and probably]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
A Bequest to Music is in the public domain. This text is taken from Shapes of Clay (1903), Project Gutenberg ebook #12658; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Ambrose Bierce, A Bequest to Music, in Shapes of Clay (1903), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #12658, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/bierce-shapes-of-clay/a-bequest-to-music.html, id L28093.
Form and metre
A Bequest to Music is 5 lines in a single stanza. It rhymes ABAAB. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic pentameter.
See other poems in iambic pentameter.
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 ABAAB diedA · beginsB · tideA · wideA · chinsB
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 pentameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| "Let music flourish!" So he said and died. | 10 | ·/˘/˘····· |
| Hark! ere he's gone the minstrelsy begins: | 10 | ·····/˘˘˘/ |
| The symphonies ascend, a swelling tide, | 10 | ·/˘˘˘/·/˘· |
| Melodious thunders fill the welkin wide-- | 10 | ˘/˘/˘··/˘· |
| The grand old lawyers, chinning on their chins! | 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.