Nocturne
O royal night, under your stars that keepTheir golden troops in charted motion set,The living legions are renewed in sleepFor bloodier battle yet.
O royal death, under your boundless skyWhere unrecorded constellations throng,Dispassionate those other legions lie,Invulnerably strong.
Words in this poem
- dispassionate a.
- Free from passion; not warped, prejudiced, swerved, or carried away by passion or feeling; judicial; calm; composed.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Nocturne is in the public domain. This text is taken from Poems, 1908-1919, Project Gutenberg ebook #51575; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: John Drinkwater, Nocturne, in Poems, 1908-1919 (1919), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #51575, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/drinkwater-poems/nocturne.html, id L23120.
Form and metre
Nocturne is 8 lines in 2 stanzas of 4 lines each. Every stanza rhymes ABAB. The metre is iambic pentameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 94%).
See 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 ABAB keepA · setB · sleepA · yetB
- 2 ABAB skyA · throngB · lieA · strongB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| O royal night, under your stars that keep | 10 | ·/˘······· |
| Their golden troops in charted motion set, | 10 | ·/˘··/˘/˘· |
| The living legions are renewed in sleep | 10 | ·/˘/˘·˘/·· |
| For bloodier battle yet. | 7 | ·/˘˘/˘· |
| O royal death, under your boundless sky | 10 | ·/˘····/˘· |
| Where unrecorded constellations throng, | 10 | ··˘/˘·˘/˘· |
| Dispassionate those other legions lie, | 10 | ˘/˘˘·/˘/˘· |
| Invulnerably strong. | 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.