Iceland
The climate is intensely cold;Wild curates would not drag me there;Not tho' they brought great bags of gold,And piled them underneath my chair.If twenty bishops bade me go,I should decidedly say, 'No!'
Words in this poem
- intensely adv.
- Intently. J. Spencer.
- piled a.
- Having a pile or point; pointed. [From 2d Pile.]
- bade
- A form of the pat tense of Bid.
- decidedly adv.
- In a decided manner; indisputably; clearly; thoroughly.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Iceland is in the public domain. This text is taken from Verse and Worse, Project Gutenberg ebook #36702; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Harry Graham, Iceland, in Verse and Worse (1905), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #36702, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/graham-verse-and-worse/iceland.html, id L23305.
Form and metre
Iceland is 6 lines in a single stanza. It rhymes ABABCC. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 91%).
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 ABABCC coldA · thereB · goldA · chairB · goC · noC
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 |
|---|---|---|
| The climate is intensely cold; | 8 | ·/˘·˘/˘· |
| Wild curates would not drag me there; | 8 | ·/˘····· |
| Not tho' they brought great bags of gold, | 8 | ········ |
| And piled them underneath my chair. | 8 | ····˘/·· |
| If twenty bishops bade me go, | 8 | ·/˘/˘··· |
| I should decidedly say, 'No!' | 8 | ··˘/˘˘·· |
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.