The Dove
I saw a dove fear-daunted,By howling storm-blast driven;Where waves their power vaunted,From land it had been riven.No cry nor moan it uttered,I heard no plaint repeated;In vain its pinions fluttered --It had to sink, defeated.
Words in this poem
- plaint n.
- Audible expression of sorrow; lamentation; complaint; hence, a mournful song; a lament. Chaucer."The Psalmist's mournful plaint." [OE. plainte, pleynte, F. plainte, fr. L. plangere, planctum (plancta, fem. p.p.), to beat, beat the breast, lament. Cf. Complain, Plague, Plangent.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
The Dove is in the public domain. This text is taken from Poems and Songs, Project Gutenberg ebook #6619, the Arthur Hubbell Palmer translation; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, The Dove, in Poems and Songs (1915), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #6619, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/bjornson-poems-and-songs/the-dove.html, id L29231.
Form and metre
The Dove is 8 lines in a single stanza. It rhymes ABABCDCD. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 95%).
See 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 ABABCDCD dauntedA · drivenB · vauntedA · rivenB · utteredC · repeatedD · flutteredC · defeatedD
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 |
|---|---|---|
| I saw a dove fear-daunted, | 7 | ·····/˘ |
| By howling storm-blast driven; | 7 | ·/˘··/˘ |
| Where waves their power vaunted, | 7 | ···/˘/˘ |
| From land it had been riven. | 7 | ·····/˘ |
| No cry nor moan it uttered, | 8 | ·····/˘˘ |
| I heard no plaint repeated; | 7 | ····˘/˘ |
| In vain its pinions fluttered -- | 8 | ···/˘/˘˘ |
| It had to sink, defeated. | 7 | ····˘/˘ |
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.