An August Midnight I
A SHADED lamp and a waving blind,And the beat of a clock from a distant floor:On this scene enter—winged, horned, and spined—A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore;While ’mid my page there idly standsA sleepy fly, that rubs its hands . . .
Words in this poem
- spined a.
- Furnished with spines; spiny.
- longlegs n.
- A daddy longlegs.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
An August Midnight I is in the public domain. This text is taken from Poems of the Past and the Present, Project Gutenberg ebook #3168; 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, An August Midnight I, in Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #3168, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/hardy-past-and-present/an-august-midnight-i.html, id L16910.
Form and metre
An August Midnight I is 6 lines in a single stanza. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 79%). 92% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 9.2 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 -A-ABB blind · floorA · spined · dumbledoreA · standsB · handsB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| A SHADED lamp and a waving blind, | 9 | ·/˘···/˘· |
| And the beat of a clock from a distant floor: | 11 | ········/˘· |
| On this scene enter—winged, horned, and spined— | 9 | ···/˘···· |
| A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore; | 10 | ·/········ |
| While ’mid my page there idly stands | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands . . . | 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.