Homeward Bound XX
I tread the dear familiar path,The old road I have taken;I stand before my darling's house,Now empty and forsaken.
Oh far too narrow is the street,The roofs seem tottering downward.The very pavement burns my feet;I hurry faster onward.
About this text
Homeward Bound XX 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 XX, in Poems and Ballads (1881), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #31726, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/heine-poems-ballads/homeward-bound-xx.html, id L15347.
Form and metre
Homeward Bound XX is 8 lines in 2 stanzas of 4 lines each. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 92%). 95% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 7.6 syllables. 4 lines end 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 -A-A path · takenA · house · forsakenA
- 2 A-A- streetA · downward · feetA · onward
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 tread the dear familiar path, | 8 | ····˘/˘· |
| The old road I have taken; | 7 | ·····/˘ |
| I stand before my darling's house, | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| Now empty and forsaken. | 7 | ·/˘·˘/˘ |
| Oh far too narrow is the street, | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| The roofs seem tottering downward. | 8 | ···/˘˘/˘ |
| The very pavement burns my feet; | 8 | ·/˘/˘··· |
| I hurry faster onward. | 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.