Kavin Again
It is not anything he says,It's just his presence and his smile,The blarney of his silencesThat cocker and beguile.
Words in this poem
- cocker n.
- One given to cockfighting. Steele. [From Cock the bird.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Kavin Again is in the public domain. This text is taken from More Songs From Vagabondia, Project Gutenberg ebook #18007; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Bliss Carman, Kavin Again, in More Songs from Vagabondia (1896), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #18007, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/carman-vagabondia/kavin-again.html, id L24695.
Form and metre
Kavin Again is 4 lines in a single stanza. It rhymes ABAB. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic tetrameter.
See 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 ABAB saysA · smileB · silencesA · beguileB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| It is not anything he says, | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| It's just his presence and his smile, | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| The blarney of his silences | 8 | ·/˘··/˘˘ |
| That cocker and beguile. | 6 | ·/˘·˘/ |
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.