Nahant
All day the waves assailed the rock,I heard no church-bell chime,The sea-beat scorns the minster clockAnd breaks the glass of Time.
Words in this poem
- chime n.
- The harmonious sound of bells, or of musical instruments. [OE. chimbe, prop., cymbal, OF. cymbe, cymble, in a dialectic form, chymble, F. cymbale, L. cymbalum, fr. Gr. Cymbal.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Nahant 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, Nahant, in Poems (1847), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #12843, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/emerson-poems/nahant.html, id L07548.
Form and metre
Nahant is 4 lines in a single stanza. It rhymes ABAB. 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 7.0 syllables.
See 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 ABAB rockA · chimeB · clockA · timeB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| All day the waves assailed the rock, | 8 | ····˘/·· |
| I heard no church-bell chime, | 6 | ······ |
| The sea-beat scorns the minster clock | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| And breaks the glass of Time. | 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.