A Summer's Night
The night is dewy as a maiden's mouth,The skies are bright as are a maiden's eyes,Soft as a maiden's breath the wind that fliesUp from the perfumed bosom of the South.Like sentinels, the pines stand in the park;And hither hastening, like rakes that roam,With lamps to light their wayward footsteps home,The fireflies come stagg'ring down the dark.
Words in this poem
- wayward a.
- Taking one's own way; disobedient; froward; perverse; willful. [OE. weiward, for aweiward, i. e., turned away. See Away, and -ward.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
A Summer's Night 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 Summer's Night, in The Complete Poems (1893–1905), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #18338, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/dunbar-poems/a-summer-s-night.html, id L00558.
Form and metre
A Summer's Night is 8 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets, 50% of the lines: heroic couplets. The metre is iambic pentameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 86%). 94% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 9.8 syllables. 12% 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 ABBACDDC mouthA · eyesB · fliesB · southA · parkC · roamD · homeD · darkC
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 night is dewy as a maiden's mouth, | 10 | ···/˘··/˘· |
| The skies are bright as are a maiden's eyes, | 10 | ·······/˘· |
| Soft as a maiden's breath the wind that flies | 10 | ···/˘····· |
| Up from the perfumed bosom of the South. | 10 | ···˘//˘··· |
| Like sentinels, the pines stand in the park; | 10 | ·/˘˘······ |
| And hither hastening, like rakes that roam, | 10 | ·/˘/˘˘···· |
| With lamps to light their wayward footsteps home, | 10 | ·····/˘/·· |
| The fireflies come stagg'ring down the dark. | 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.