When the Wind Comes Up the Hill
OH! the wind among the trees,How it stirs their wood to song!Little whispered melodies,All the winding road along.
Was there ever such a sound,Breaking through a noontide still,As this tune the trees have found,When the wind comes up the hill!
Words in this poem
- noontide n.
- The time of noon; midday. [From noon + tide time; cf. AS. n the ninth hour.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
When the Wind Comes Up the Hill is in the public domain. This text is taken from Songs of Three Counties, and Other Poems, Project Gutenberg ebook #50591; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Radclyffe Hall, When the Wind Comes Up the Hill, in Songs of Three Counties, and Other Poems (1913), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #50591, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/hall-three-counties/when-the-wind-comes-up-the-hill.html, id L22680.
Form and metre
When the Wind Comes Up the Hill is 8 lines in 2 stanzas of 4 lines each. Every stanza rhymes ABAB. The metre is trochaic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 96%).
See other poems in trochaic 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 treesA · songB · melodiesA · alongB
- 2 ABAB soundA · stillB · foundA · hillB
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 trochaic tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| OH! the wind among the trees, | 7 | ······· |
| How it stirs their wood to song! | 7 | ······· |
| Little whispered melodies, | 8 | /˘/˘˘/˘˘ |
| All the winding road along. | 7 | ··/˘·˘/ |
| Was there ever such a sound, | 7 | ··/˘··· |
| Breaking through a noontide still, | 7 | /˘··/˘· |
| As this tune the trees have found, | 7 | ······· |
| When the wind comes up the hill! | 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.