Advice to a Street-Pavement
Lacerated grey has bittenInto your shapeless humility.Little episodes of rovingStrew their hieroglyphics on your muteness.Life has given you heavy stainsLike an ointment growing stale.Endless feet tap over youWith a maniac insistence.
O unresisting street-pavement,Keep your passive insolenceAt the dwarfs who scorn you with their feet.Only one who lies upon his backCan disregard the stars.
Words in this poem
- lacerated p. a.
- Rent; torn; mangled; as, a lacerated wound. [L. laceratus, p. p.]
- muteness n.
- The quality or state of being mute; speechlessness.
- maniac a.
- Raving with madness; raging with disordered intellect; affected with mania; mad. [F. maniaque. See Mania.]
- insistence n.
- The quality of insisting, or being urgent or pressing; the act of dwelling upon as of special importance; persistence; urgency.
- insolence n.
- The quality of being unusual or novel. [F. insolence, L. insolentia. See Insolent.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Advice to a Street-Pavement 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 Street-Pavement, in Advice: A Book of Poems (1920), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #60252, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/bodenheim-advice/advice-to-a-street-pavement.html, id L23364.
Form and metre
Advice to a Street-Pavement is 13 lines in 2 stanzas. The metre is trochaic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 90%).
See other poems in trochaic 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.
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 trochaic tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Lacerated grey has bitten | 8 | /˘·˘··/˘ |
| Into your shapeless humility. | 9 | ···/˘˘/˘˘ |
| Little episodes of roving | 8 | /˘/˘··/˘ |
| Strew their hieroglyphics on your muteness. | 10 | ···˘/˘··/˘ |
| Life has given you heavy stains | 8 | ··/˘·/˘· |
| Like an ointment growing stale. | 7 | ··/˘/˘· |
| Endless feet tap over you | 7 | /˘····· |
| With a maniac insistence. | 8 | ··/˘·˘/˘ |
| O unresisting street-pavement, | 8 | ······/˘ |
| Keep your passive insolence | 7 | ··/˘/˘˘ |
| At the dwarfs who scorn you with their feet. | 9 | ········· |
| Only one who lies upon his back | 9 | /˘······· |
| Can disregard the stars. | 6 | ··˘/·· |
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.