Carmen XVIII: To Priapus, the Garden-God
This grove to thee devote I give, Priapus!Who home be Lampsacus and holt, Priapus!For thee in cities worship most the shoresOf Hellespont the richest oystery strand.
Words in this poem
- holt
- 3d pers. sing. pres. of Hold, contr. from holdeth.
- hellespont n.
- A narrow strait between Europe and Asia, now called the Daradanelles. It connects the Ægean Sea and the sea of Marmora.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Carmen XVIII: To Priapus, the Garden-God is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Carmina, Project Gutenberg ebook #20732, the Richard Burton 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: Catullus, Carmen XVIII: To Priapus, the Garden-God, in The Carmina (1894), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #20732, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/catullus-carmina/carmen-xviii-to-priapus-the-garden-god.html, id L13801.
Form and metre
Carmen XVIII: To Priapus, the Garden-God is 4 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets, 50% of the lines: heroic couplets. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic pentameter. 95% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 10.2 syllables.
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 AA-- priapusA · priapusA · shores · strand
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 |
|---|---|---|
| This grove to thee devote I give, Priapus! | 10 | ····˘/···· |
| Who home be Lampsacus and holt, Priapus! | 10 | ·········· |
| For thee in cities worship most the shores | 10 | ···/˘/˘··· |
| Of Hellespont the richest oystery strand. | 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.