Dregs
The fire is out, and spent the warmth thereof(This is the end of every song man sings!)The golden wine is drunk, the dregs remain,Bitter as wormwood and as salt as pain;And health and hope have gone the way of loveInto the drear oblivion of lost things.Ghosts go along with us until the end;This was a mistress, this, perhaps, a friend.With pale, indifferent eyes, we sit and waitFor the dropt curtain and the closing gate:This is the end of all the songs man sings.
Words in this poem
- drear n.
- Sadness; dismalness.
- oblivion n.
- The act of forgetting, or the state of being forgotten; cessation of remembrance; forgetfulness. [L. oblivio, akin to oblivisci to forget: cf. OF. oblivion.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Dregs is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Poems and Prose of Ernest Dowson, With a Memoir by Arthur Symons, Project Gutenberg ebook #8497; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Ernest Dowson, Dregs, in The Poems of Ernest Dowson (1896–1899), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #8497, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/dowson-poems/dregs.html, id L01679.
Form and metre
Dregs is 11 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets, 55% of the lines: heroic couplets. The metre is iambic pentameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 88%). 97% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 10.0 syllables. 27% of the lines run on without a stop at the line end.
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 ABCCABDDEEB thereofA · singsB · remainC · painC · loveA · thingsB · endD · friendD · waitE · gateE · singsB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| The fire is out, and spent the warmth thereof | 10 | ·/········ |
| (This is the end of every song man sings!) | 10 | ·····/˘··· |
| The golden wine is drunk, the dregs remain, | 10 | ·/˘·····˘/ |
| Bitter as wormwood and as salt as pain; | 10 | /˘·/······ |
| And health and hope have gone the way of love | 10 | ·········· |
| Into the drear oblivion of lost things. | 10 | ····˘/˘··· |
| Ghosts go along with us until the end; | 10 | ··˘/······ |
| This was a mistress, this, perhaps, a friend. | 10 | ···/˘·˘/·· |
| With pale, indifferent eyes, we sit and wait | 10 | ··˘/˘····· |
| For the dropt curtain and the closing gate: | 10 | ···/˘··/˘· |
| This is the end of all the songs man sings. | 10 | ·········· |
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.