Advice to a Hornèd Toad
Hornèd Toad of cloven brown,Rock souls have dwindled to your eyesAnd thrown a splintered end upon your blood.Night and day have vanishedTo you, who squat and watchYears loosen one sand grain untilIts fall becomes your moment.Tall things plunge over you,Slashing their dreams with motionThat holds the death of all they seek,But you, to whom fierce winds are ripples,Do not move lest you lose the taste of stillness.
Hornèd Toad of cloven brown,Never hop from your grey rock creviceMute with interwoven beginnings and ends.The fluid lies of motionLeave no remembrance behind.
Words in this poem
- stillness n.
- The quality or state of being still; quietness; silence; calmness; inactivity.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Advice to a Hornèd Toad is in the public domain. This text is taken from Advice: A Book of Poems, Project Gutenberg ebook #60252; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Maxwell Bodenheim, Advice to a Hornèd Toad, in Advice: A Book of Poems (1920), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #60252, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/bodenheim-advice/advice-to-a-horn-d-toad.html, id L23368.
Form and metre
Advice to a Hornèd Toad is 17 lines in 2 stanzas. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 86%).
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.
- 2 A--A- brownA · crevice · ends · motionA · behind
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Hornèd Toad of cloven brown, | 6 | ···/˘· |
| Rock souls have dwindled to your eyes | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| And thrown a splintered end upon your blood. | 10 | ···/˘····· |
| Night and day have vanished | 7 | ····/˘˘ |
| To you, who squat and watch | 6 | ······ |
| Years loosen one sand grain until | 8 | ·/˘····· |
| Its fall becomes your moment. | 7 | ··˘/·/˘ |
| Tall things plunge over you, | 6 | ······ |
| Slashing their dreams with motion | 7 | /˘···/˘ |
| That holds the death of all they seek, | 8 | ········ |
| But you, to whom fierce winds are ripples, | 9 | ·······/˘ |
| Do not move lest you lose the taste of stillness. | 11 | ·········/˘ |
| Hornèd Toad of cloven brown, | 6 | ···/˘· |
| Never hop from your grey rock crevice | 9 | /˘·····/˘ |
| Mute with interwoven beginnings and ends. | 11 | ···˘/˘˘/˘·· |
| The fluid lies of motion | 7 | ·/˘··/˘ |
| Leave no remembrance behind. | 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.