Forester
He took the color of his vestFrom rabbit's coat or grouse's breast;For, as the wood-kinds lurk and hide,So walks the woodman, unespied.
Words in this poem
- vest n.
- An article of clothing covering the person; an outer garment; a vestment; a dress; a vesture; a robe. [L. vestis a garment, vesture; akin to Goth. wasti, and E. wear: cf. F. veste. See Wear to carry on the person, and cf. Divest, Invest, Travesty.]
- woodman n.
- A forest officer appointed to take care of the king's woods; a forester. [Eng.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Forester is in the public domain. This text is taken from Poems Household Edition, Project Gutenberg ebook #12843; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Forester, in Poems (1847), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #12843, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/emerson-poems/forester.html, id L07510.
Form and metre
Forester is 4 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets: octosyllabic couplets. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic tetrameter. 100% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 7.8 syllables.
See other poems in octosyllabic couplets, other poems in iambic tetrameter.
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 vestA · breastA · hideB · unespiedB
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 tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| He took the color of his vest | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| From rabbit's coat or grouse's breast; | 8 | ·/˘··/˘· |
| For, as the wood-kinds lurk and hide, | 8 | ········ |
| So walks the woodman, unespied. | 7 | ···/˘·· |
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.