The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale
"One fatal remembrance--one sorrow that throwsIts bleak shade alike o'er our joys and our woes--To which Life nothing darker nor brighter can bring,For which joy hath no balm--and affliction no sting."
About this text
The Giaour: A Fragment of 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, The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale, in The Giaour, and Other Poems (1816), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #21811, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/byron-works-3/the-giaour-a-fragment-of-a-turkish-tale.html, id L23862.
Form and metre
The Giaour: A Fragment of 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 throwsA · woesA · bringB · stingB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| "One fatal remembrance--one sorrow that throws | 11 | ·/˘˘/˘·/˘·· |
| Its bleak shade alike o'er our joys and our woes-- | 11 | ···˘/·/··/· |
| To which Life nothing darker nor brighter can bring, | 11 | ···/˘/˘·/·· |
| For which joy hath no balm--and affliction no sting." | 12 | ·······˘/˘·· |
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.