The Seasons of Her Year I
WINTER is white on turf and tree,And birds are fled;But summer songsters pipe to me,And petals spread,For what I dreamt of secretlyHis lips have said!
About this text
The Seasons of Her Year 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, The Seasons of Her Year 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/the-seasons-of-her-year-i.html, id L16924.
Form and metre
The Seasons of Her Year I is 6 lines in a single stanza. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 91%). 94% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 6.0 syllables. 1 line ends on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending.
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 ABAB-B treeA · fledB · meA · spreadB · secretly · saidB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| WINTER is white on turf and tree, | 8 | /˘······ |
| And birds are fled; | 4 | ···· |
| But summer songsters pipe to me, | 8 | ·/˘····· |
| And petals spread, | 4 | ·/˘· |
| For what I dreamt of secretly | 8 | ·····/˘˘ |
| His lips have said! | 4 | ···· |
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.