A Musical
Outside the rain upon the street,The sky all grim of hue,Inside, the music-painful sweet,And yet I heard but you.
As is a thrilling violin,So is your voice to me,And still above the other strains,It sang in ecstasy.
Words in this poem
- thrilling a.
- Causing a thrill; causing tremulous excitement; deeply moving; as, a thrilling romance.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
A Musical is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Project Gutenberg ebook #18338; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Paul Laurence Dunbar, A Musical, in The Complete Poems (1893–1905), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #18338, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/dunbar-poems/a-musical.html, id L00841.
Form and metre
A Musical is 8 lines in 2 stanzas of 4 lines each. The metre is common measure, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 88%). 87% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 7.0 syllables. 1 line ends on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending.
See other poems in common measure.
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 streetA · hueB · sweetA · youB
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 common measure. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Outside the rain upon the street, | 8 | //······ |
| The sky all grim of hue, | 6 | ······ |
| Inside, the music-painful sweet, | 8 | ˘/·/˘/˘· |
| And yet I heard but you. | 6 | ······ |
| As is a thrilling violin, | 8 | ···/˘˘˘/ |
| So is your voice to me, | 6 | ······ |
| And still above the other strains, | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| It sang in ecstasy. | 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.