Envoy
Prince, pride must have a fall.What is the worth of allYour state’s supreme urbanities?Bad at the best’s the game.Well might the Sage exclaim:—‘O Vanity of Vanities!’
About this text
Envoy is in the public domain. This text is taken from Poems, Project Gutenberg ebook #1568; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: W. E. Henley, Envoy, in Poems (1898), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #1568, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/henley-poems/envoy-8.html, id L12368.
Form and metre
Envoy is 6 lines in a single stanza. It rhymes AABCCB. The metre is iambic trimeter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 82%). 94% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 6.5 syllables. 1 line ends on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending.
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.
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 AABCCB fallA · allA · urbanitiesB · gameC · exclaimC · vanitiesB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Prince, pride must have a fall. | 6 | ······ |
| What is the worth of all | 6 | ······ |
| Your state’s supreme urbanities? | 7 | ··˘/··· |
| Bad at the best’s the game. | 6 | ······ |
| Well might the Sage exclaim:— | 6 | ····˘/ |
| ‘O Vanity of Vanities!’ | 8 | ·/˘˘·/˘˘ |
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.