First Voice
I loved a girl with truth and pain,She loved me not. When she said good-byeShe gave me a kiss to sting and stainMy broken life to a rosy dye.
About this text
First Voice is in the public domain. This text is taken from Pike County Ballads and Other Poems, Project Gutenberg ebook #6062; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: John Hay, First Voice, in Pike County Ballads and Other Poems (1871), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #6062, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/hay-pike-county/first-voice.html, id L21586.
Form and metre
First Voice is 4 lines in a single stanza. It rhymes ABAB. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic tetrameter.
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 painA · byeB · stainA · dyeB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| I loved a girl with truth and pain, | 8 | ········ |
| She loved me not. When she said good-bye | 9 | ········· |
| She gave me a kiss to sting and stain | 9 | ········· |
| My broken life to a rosy dye. | 9 | ·/˘···/˘· |
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.