A Turkish Tale
"Had we never loved sae kindly,Had we never loved sae blindly,Never met--or never parted,We had ne'er been broken-hearted."--
Words in this poem
- blindly adv.
- Without sight, discernment, or understanding; without thought, investigation, knowledge, or purpose of one's own.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
A Turkish Tale is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Works of Lord Byron. Vol. 3, Project Gutenberg ebook #21811; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Lord Byron, A Turkish Tale, in The Giaour, and Other Poems (1816), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #21811, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/byron-works-3/a-turkish-tale.html, id L23865.
Form and metre
A Turkish Tale 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.
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 kindlyA · blindlyA · partedB · heartedB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| "Had we never loved sae kindly, | 8 | ··/˘··/˘ |
| Had we never loved sae blindly, | 8 | ··/˘··/˘ |
| Never met--or never parted, | 8 | /˘··/˘/˘ |
| We had ne'er been broken-hearted."-- | 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.