An Inscription (For a Proposed Monument in Washington to Him who Made it Beautiful)
Erected to "Boss" Shepherd by the dearGood folk he lived and moved among in peace--Guarded on either hand by the police,With soldiers in his front and in his rear.
Words in this poem
- folk n.
- In Anglo-Saxon times, the people of a group of townships or villages; a community; a tribe. [AS. folc; akin to D. volk, OS. & OHG. folk, G. volk, Icel. f, Sw. & Dan. folk, Lith. pulkas crowd, and perh. to E. follow.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
An Inscription (For a Proposed Monument in Washington to Him who Made it Beautiful) 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, An Inscription (For a Proposed Monument in Washington to Him who Made it Beautiful), in Shapes of Clay (1903), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #12658, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/bierce-shapes-of-clay/an-inscription-monument.html, id L28032.
Form and metre
An Inscription (For a Proposed Monument in Washington to Him who Made it Beautiful) is 4 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets, 50% of the lines: 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 ABBA dearA · peaceB · policeB · rearA
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Erected to "Boss" Shepherd by the dear | 10 | ˘/˘··/˘··· |
| Good folk he lived and moved among in peace-- | 10 | ·········· |
| Guarded on either hand by the police, | 10 | /˘·/˘···˘/ |
| With soldiers in his front and in his rear. | 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.