Death
Storm and strife and stress,Lost in a wilderness,Groping to find a way,Forth to the haunts of day
Sudden a vista peeps,Out of the tangled deeps,Only a point--the rayBut at the end is day.
Dark is the dawn and chill,Daylight is on the hill,Night is the flitting breath,Day rides the hills of death.
Words in this poem
- strife n.
- The act of striving; earnest endeavor. [OF. estrif. See Strive.]
- vista n.
- A view; especially, a view through or between intervening objects, as trees; a view or prospect through an avenue, or the like; hence, the trees or other objects that form the avenue. [It., sight, view, fr. vedere, p. p. visto, veduto, to see, fr. L. videre, visum. See View, Vision.]
- daylight n.
- The light of day as opposed to the darkness of night; the light of the sun, as opposed to that of the moon or to artificial light.
- flitting n.
- A flying with lightness and celerity; a fluttering.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Death 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, Death, in The Complete Poems (1893–1905), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #18338, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/dunbar-poems/death.html, id L00799.
Form and metre
Death is 12 lines in 3 stanzas of 4 lines each. The rhyme scheme is AABB, complete in 2 of its 3 stanzas. The metre is iambic trimeter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 89%). 90% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 6.0 syllables. 1 line ends on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending. 17% of the lines run on without a stop at the line end.
See other poems in iambic trimeter.
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 AABB stressA · wildernessA · wayB · dayB
- 2 --AA peeps · deeps · rayA · dayA
- 3 AABB chillA · hillA · breathB · deathB
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 trimeter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Storm and strife and stress, | 5 | ····· |
| Lost in a wilderness, | 6 | ···/˘˘ |
| Groping to find a way, | 6 | /˘···· |
| Forth to the haunts of day | 6 | ······ |
| Sudden a vista peeps, | 6 | /˘·/˘· |
| Out of the tangled deeps, | 7 | ···/˘˘· |
| Only a point--the ray | 6 | /˘···· |
| But at the end is day. | 6 | ······ |
| Dark is the dawn and chill, | 6 | ······ |
| Daylight is on the hill, | 6 | /····· |
| Night is the flitting breath, | 6 | ···/˘· |
| Day rides the hills of death. | 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.