Advice to a Pool
Be a liquid threshold for the dawnAnd let night touch you with his back.The earth-bowl prisoning you, and cold night winds
Are only pause and rhythmWithin an endless fantasy,But you, like they, can beA dream from the loins of a dream,And build a golden stairway of escape.
O coolly unperturbed pool,Slap your ripples in laughter at men,Who splash you with their lordly hands.Time is but a phantom daggerThat motion lifts to slay itself.
Words in this poem
- fantasy n.
- Fancy; imagination; especially, a whimsical or fanciful conception; a vagary of the imagination; whim; caprice; humor. [See Fancy.]
- stairway n.
- A flight of stairs or steps; a staircase.
- coolly adv.
- In a cool manner; without heat or excessive cold; without passion or ardor; calmly; deliberately; with indifference; impudently.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Advice to a Pool 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 Pool, in Advice: A Book of Poems (1920), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #60252, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/bodenheim-advice/advice-to-a-pool.html, id L23376.
Form and metre
Advice to a Pool is 13 lines in 3 stanzas. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 82%).
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- rhythmA · fantasy · be · dreamA · escape
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Be a liquid threshold for the dawn | 9 | ··/˘/···· |
| And let night touch you with his back. | 8 | ········ |
| The earth-bowl prisoning you, and cold night winds | 10 | ···/˘····· |
| Are only pause and rhythm | 7 | ·/˘··/˘ |
| Within an endless fantasy, | 8 | ···/˘/˘˘ |
| But you, like they, can be | 6 | ······ |
| A dream from the loins of a dream, | 8 | ········ |
| And build a golden stairway of escape. | 10 | ···/˘/··˘/ |
| O coolly unperturbed pool, | 8 | ·/˘·˘/˘· |
| Slap your ripples in laughter at men, | 9 | ··/˘·/˘·· |
| Who splash you with their lordly hands. | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| Time is but a phantom dagger | 8 | ····/˘/˘ |
| That motion lifts to slay itself. | 8 | ·/˘···˘/ |
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.