Homeward Bound LII
Maiden with the lips of scarlet,Clearest, sweetest eyes that be,O my darling little maiden,Ever do I think of thee!
Dreary is the winter evening:Would that I were in thy home,Sitting by thee, calmly chatting,In the cosy little room.
Words in this poem
- dreary a.
- Sorrowful; distressful. [OE. dreori, dreri, AS. dreórig, sad; akin to G. traurig, and prob. to AS. dreósan to fall, Goth. driusan. Cf. Dross, Drear, Drizzle, Drowse.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Homeward Bound LII is in the public domain. This text is taken from Poems and Ballads, Project Gutenberg ebook #31726, the Emma Lazarus translation; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Heinrich Heine, Homeward Bound LII, in Poems and Ballads (1881), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #31726, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/heine-poems-ballads/homeward-bound-lii.html, id L15377.
Form and metre
Homeward Bound LII is 8 lines in 2 stanzas of 4 lines each. The metre is trochaic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 95%). 100% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 7.5 syllables. 4 lines end on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending.
See other poems in trochaic 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-A scarlet · beA · maiden · theeA
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 trochaic tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Maiden with the lips of scarlet, | 8 | /˘····/˘ |
| Clearest, sweetest eyes that be, | 7 | /˘/˘··· |
| O my darling little maiden, | 8 | ··/˘/˘/˘ |
| Ever do I think of thee! | 7 | /˘····· |
| Dreary is the winter evening: | 8 | /˘··/˘/˘ |
| Would that I were in thy home, | 7 | ······· |
| Sitting by thee, calmly chatting, | 8 | /˘··/˘/˘ |
| In the cosy little room. | 7 | ··/˘/˘· |
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.