House Fear
Always--I tell you this they learned--Always at night when they returnedTo the lonely house from far awayTo lamps unlighted and fire gone gray,They learned to rattle the lock and keyTo give whatever might chance to beWarning and time to be off in flight:And preferring the out- to the in-door night,They learned to leave the house-door wideUntil they had lit the lamp inside.
About this text
House Fear is in the public domain. This text is taken from Mountain Interval, Project Gutenberg ebook #29345; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Robert Frost, House Fear, in Mountain Interval (1916), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #29345, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/frost-mountain-interval/house-fear.html, id L02656.
Form and metre
House Fear is 10 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets: heroic couplets. The metre is iambic pentameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 80%). 91% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 9.4 syllables. 2 lines end on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending. 50% 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 AABBCCDDEE learnedA · returnedA · awayB · grayB · keyC · beC · flightD · nightD · wideE · insideE
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Always--I tell you this they learned-- | 9 | /˘······˘ |
| Always at night when they returned | 9 | /·····˘/˘ |
| To the lonely house from far away | 9 | ··/˘···˘/ |
| To lamps unlighted and fire gone gray, | 10 | ······/˘·· |
| They learned to rattle the lock and key | 10 | ··˘·/˘···· |
| To give whatever might chance to be | 9 | ···/˘···· |
| Warning and time to be off in flight: | 9 | /˘······· |
| And preferring the out- to the in-door night, | 11 | ·˘/˘······· |
| They learned to leave the house-door wide | 9 | ··˘······ |
| Until they had lit the lamp inside. | 9 | ·······˘/ |
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.