A Paradox
"If life were not worth having," said the preacher,"'T would have in suicide one pleasant feature.""An error," said the pessimist, "you're making:What's not worth having cannot be worth taking."
Words in this poem
- pessimist n.
- One who advocates the doctrine of pessimism; -- opposed to Ant: optimist. [L. pessimus worst: cf. F. pessimiste.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
A Paradox 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 Paradox, in Shapes of Clay (1903), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #12658, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/bierce-shapes-of-clay/a-paradox.html, id L28115.
Form and metre
A Paradox is 4 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets: heroic couplets. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic pentameter.
See other poems in heroic couplets, 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 AABB preacherA · featureA · makingB · takingB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| "If life were not worth having," said the preacher, | 11 | ·····/˘··/˘ |
| "'T would have in suicide one pleasant feature." | 12 | ····/˘··/˘/˘ |
| "An error," said the pessimist, "you're making: | 11 | ·/˘··/˘˘·/˘ |
| What's not worth having cannot be worth taking." | 11 | ···/˘/˘··/˘ |
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.