Voice of God
Hark! In the temple the voice of God is sounding.“O people of one speech and one endeavourYours is the land with my best gifts aboundingWhereon the smile of heaven is resting ever!
“Away the armed hosts your gates surrounding!The barbarous hordes that come your speech to sever,To raze the fortunes of your fathers' founding,And call you slaves! That will I pardon never!
“Rather within your tombs the flame be stirredAs from an awful flash in heaven burning,Such as gave forth the Maccabean's word.”Hail Voice divine! be ours the quick discerningOf what thy message means: in thee be heardSavonarola's spirit to us returning!
Words in this poem
- endeavour v. t.
- To exert physical or intellectual strength for the attainment of; to use efforts to effect; to strive to achieve or reach; to try; to attempt. [OE. endevor; pref. en- + dever, devoir, duty, F. devoir: cf. F. se mettre en devoir de faire quelque chose to try to do a thing, to go about it. See Devoir, Deb]
- whereon adv.
- On which; -- used relatively; as, the earth whereon we live.
- raze n.
- A Shakespearean word (used once) supposed to mean the same as race, a root. [See Rack.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Voice of God is in the public domain. This text is taken from By Frank Sewall (London: Osgood, McIlvaine & Co., 1893), Project Gutenberg ebook #56711, the Frank Sewall 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: Giosuè Carducci, Voice of God, in Poems of Giosuè Carducci (1893), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #56711, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/carducci-poems/voice-of-god.html, id L26539.
Form and metre
Voice of God is 14 lines in 3 stanzas. The rhyme scheme is ABAB, complete in 2 of its 3 stanzas. The metre is alexandrines, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 84%).
See other poems in alexandrines.
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 ABAB soundingA · endeavourB · aboundingA · everB
- 2 ABAB surroundingA · severB · foundingA · neverB
- 3 ABABAB stirredA · burningB · wordA · discerningB · heardA · returningB
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 alexandrines. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Hark! In the temple the voice of God is sounding. | 12 | ···/˘·····/˘ |
| “O people of one speech and one endeavour | 11 | ·/˘·····˘/˘ |
| Yours is the land with my best gifts abounding | 11 | ········˘/˘ |
| Whereon the smile of heaven is resting ever! | 11 | ˘/···/·/˘/˘ |
| “Away the armed hosts your gates surrounding! | 10 | ˘/·····˘/˘ |
| The barbarous hordes that come your speech to sever, | 11 | ·/˘······/˘ |
| To raze the fortunes of your fathers' founding, | 11 | ···/˘··/˘/˘ |
| And call you slaves! That will I pardon never! | 11 | ·······/˘/˘ |
| “Rather within your tombs the flame be stirred | 10 | /˘········ |
| As from an awful flash in heaven burning, | 11 | ···/˘··/˘/˘ |
| Such as gave forth the Maccabean's word.” | 10 | ······˘/˘· |
| Hail Voice divine! be ours the quick discerning | 11 | ··˘/·/··˘/˘ |
| Of what thy message means: in thee be heard | 10 | ···/˘····· |
| Savonarola's spirit to us returning! | 11 | ·····/··˘/˘ |
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.