Sun of the Sleepless!
Sun of the sleepless! melancholy star!Whose tearful beam glows tremulously far,That show'st the darkness thou canst not dispel,How like art thou to Joy remembered well!So gleams the past, the light of other days,Which shines, but warms not with its powerless rays:A night-beam Sorrow watcheth to behold,Distinct, but distant--clear--but, oh how cold!
Words in this poem
- sleepless a.
- Having no sleep; wakeful.
- tearful a.
- Abounding with tears; weeping; shedding tears; as, tearful eyes.
- dispel v. t.
- To drive away by scattering, or so to cause to vanish; to clear away; to banish; to dissipate; as, to dispel a cloud, vapors, cares, doubts, illusions. [L. dispellere; dis- + pellere to push, drive. See Pulse a beating.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Sun of the Sleepless! 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, Sun of the Sleepless!, in The Giaour, and Other Poems (1816), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #21811, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/byron-works-3/sun-of-the-sleepless.html, id L23958.
Form and metre
Sun of the Sleepless! is 8 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets: heroic couplets. The metre is iambic pentameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 89%).
See other poems in heroic couplets, other poems in iambic pentameter.
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 AABBCCDD starA · farA · dispelB · wellB · daysC · raysC · beholdD · coldD
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 pentameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Sun of the sleepless! melancholy star! | 10 | ···/˘/˘·˘· |
| Whose tearful beam glows tremulously far, | 10 | ·/˘··/˘˘˘· |
| That show'st the darkness thou canst not dispel, | 10 | ···/˘···˘/ |
| How like art thou to Joy remembered well! | 10 | ······˘/˘· |
| So gleams the past, the light of other days, | 10 | ·······/˘· |
| Which shines, but warms not with its powerless rays: | 10 | ·······/˘· |
| A night-beam Sorrow watcheth to behold, | 10 | ···/˘/˘·˘/ |
| Distinct, but distant--clear--but, oh how cold! | 10 | ˘/·/˘····· |
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.