The Caged Goldfinch
WITHIN a churchyard, on a recent grave,I saw a little cageThat jailed a goldfinch. All was silence saveIts hops from stage to stage.
There was inquiry in its wistful eye,And once it tried to sing;Of him or her who placed it there, and why,No one knew anything.
Words in this poem
- churchyard n.
- The ground adjoining a church, in which the dead are buried; a cemetery.
- wistful a.
- Longing; wishful; desirous. [For wishful; perhaps influenced by wistly, which is probably corrupted from OE. wisly certainly (from Icel. viss certain, akin to E. wit). See Wish.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
The Caged Goldfinch is in the public domain. This text is taken from Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses, Project Gutenberg ebook #3255; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Thomas Hardy, The Caged Goldfinch, in Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (1917), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #3255, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/hardy-moments-of-vision/the-caged-goldfinch.html, id L24178.
Form and metre
The Caged Goldfinch is 8 lines in 2 stanzas of 4 lines each. Every stanza rhymes ABAB. The metre is iambic pentameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 94%).
See 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 ABAB graveA · cageB · saveA · stageB
- 2 ABAB eyeA · singB · whyA · anythingB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| WITHIN a churchyard, on a recent grave, | 10 | ···/···/˘· |
| I saw a little cage | 6 | ···/˘· |
| That jailed a goldfinch. All was silence save | 10 | ···/···/˘· |
| Its hops from stage to stage. | 6 | ······ |
| There was inquiry in its wistful eye, | 10 | ··˘/˘··/˘· |
| And once it tried to sing; | 6 | ······ |
| Of him or her who placed it there, and why, | 10 | ·········· |
| No one knew anything. | 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.