Act the Third: Scene XXIV
FABIUS. With your master and your mistressHere remain confined together.
LIVIA. If THEY fancy to be Christians,What have WE done to offend them?
MOSCON. Much: 'tis crime enough for usThat we happen to be servants.
CLARIN. Flying peril in the mountain,I find here a greater peril.
About this text
Act the Third: Scene XXIV is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Wonder-Working Magician, Project Gutenberg ebook #6372, the Denis Florence MacCarthy translation; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Act the Third: Scene XXIV, in The Wonder-Working Magician (1873), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #6372, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/calderon-magico-prodigioso/act-the-third-scene-xxiv.html, id L26655.
Form and metre
Act the Third: Scene XXIV is 8 lines in 4 stanzas of 2 lines each. The metre is trochaic pentameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 87%).
See other poems in trochaic 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.
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 pentameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| FABIUS. With your master and your mistress | 10 | ····/˘··/˘ |
| Here remain confined together. | 8 | ·˘/˘/˘/˘ |
| LIVIA. If THEY fancy to be Christians, | 10 | /˘··/˘··/˘ |
| What have WE done to offend them? | 8 | ·····˘/· |
| MOSCON. Much: 'tis crime enough for us | 9 | ·····˘/·· |
| That we happen to be servants. | 8 | ··/˘··/˘ |
| CLARIN. Flying peril in the mountain, | 10 | ··/˘/˘··/˘ |
| I find here a greater peril. | 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.