Thanksgiving for a National Victory
Ye hypocrites! are these your pranks?To murder men and give God thanks!Desist, for shame!—proceed no further;God won’t accept your thanks for Murther!
Words in this poem
- murther n.
- Murder, n. & v.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Thanksgiving for a National Victory is in the public domain. This text is taken from Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, Project Gutenberg ebook #1279; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Robert Burns, Thanksgiving for a National Victory, in Poems and Songs (1786–1796), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #1279, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/burns-poems/thanksgiving-for-a-national-victory.html, id L03312.
Form and metre
Thanksgiving for a National Victory is 4 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets: octosyllabic couplets. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic tetrameter. 100% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 8.5 syllables. 2 lines end on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending.
See other poems in octosyllabic couplets, 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 AABB pranksA · thanksA · furtherB · murtherB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Ye hypocrites! are these your pranks? | 8 | ·/˘····· |
| To murder men and give God thanks! | 8 | ·/˘····· |
| Desist, for shame!—proceed no further; | 9 | ˘/··˘/·/˘ |
| God won’t accept your thanks for Murther! | 9 | ··˘/···/˘ |
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.