The Pool
Are you alive?I touch you.You quiver like a sea-fish.I cover you with my net.What are you--banded one?
About this text
The Pool is in the public domain. This text is taken from Heliodora, and Other Poems, Project Gutenberg ebook #62456; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: H.D., The Pool, in Heliodora, and Other Poems (1924), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #62456, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/hd-heliodora/the-pool.html, id L24303.
Form and metre
The Pool is 5 lines in a single stanza. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic trimeter.
See other poems in iambic trimeter.
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.
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 trimeter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Are you alive? | 4 | ··˘/ |
| I touch you. | 3 | ··· |
| You quiver like a sea-fish. | 7 | ·/˘···· |
| I cover you with my net. | 7 | ·/˘···· |
| What are you--banded one? | 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.