Spring Festival
This is the spring-tide's mournful feast,The frantic troops of blooming girlsAre rushing hither with flying curls,Moaning they smite their bare white breast,Adonis! Adonis!
The night has come. By the torches' gleamsThey search the forest on every side,That echoes with anguish far and wide,With tears, mad laughter, and sobs and screams,Adonis! Adonis!
The mortal youth so strangely fair,Lies on the cold turf pale and dead;His heart's blood staineth the flowers red,And a wild lament fulfills the air,Adonis! Adonis!
Words in this poem
- strangely adv.
- As something foreign, or not one's own; in a manner adapted to something foreign and strange.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Spring Festival 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, Spring Festival, in Poems and Ballads (1881), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #31726, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/heine-poems-ballads/spring-festival.html, id L15442.
Form and metre
Spring Festival is 15 lines in 3 stanzas of 5 lines each. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 83%). 79% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 8.0 syllables. 3 lines end on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending. 13% of the lines run on without a stop at the line end.
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 -AA-- feast · girlsA · curlsA · breast · adonis
- 2 ABBA- gleamsA · sideB · wideB · screamsA · adonis
- 3 ABBA- fairA · deadB · redB · airA · adonis
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 |
|---|---|---|
| This is the spring-tide's mournful feast, | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| The frantic troops of blooming girls | 8 | ·/˘··/˘· |
| Are rushing hither with flying curls, | 9 | ·/˘/˘·/˘· |
| Moaning they smite their bare white breast, | 8 | /˘······ |
| Adonis! Adonis! | 6 | ˘/˘˘/˘ |
| The night has come. By the torches' gleams | 9 | ······/˘· |
| They search the forest on every side, | 9 | ···/˘·/˘· |
| That echoes with anguish far and wide, | 9 | ·/˘·/˘··· |
| With tears, mad laughter, and sobs and screams, | 9 | ···/˘···· |
| Adonis! Adonis! | 6 | ˘/˘˘/˘ |
| The mortal youth so strangely fair, | 8 | ·/˘··/˘· |
| Lies on the cold turf pale and dead; | 8 | ········ |
| His heart's blood staineth the flowers red, | 8 | ···/˘·/· |
| And a wild lament fulfills the air, | 9 | ···˘/˘/·· |
| Adonis! Adonis! | 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.