10. Affliction
God ne'er afflicts us more than our desert,Though He may seem to overact His part:Sometimes He strikes us more than flesh can bear;But yet still less than grace can suffer here.
Words in this poem
- overact v. t.
- To act or perform to excess; to exaggerate in acting; as, he overacted his part.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
10. Affliction is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2, Project Gutenberg ebook #22421; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Robert Herrick, 10. Affliction, in Hesperides (1648), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #22421, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/herrick-hesperides/10-affliction.html, id L06021.
Form and metre
10. Affliction is 4 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets, 50% of the lines. The lines average 10.2 syllables. 1 line ends on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending.
See other poems in rhyming couplets.
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 desert · part · bearA · hereA
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. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| God ne'er afflicts us more than our desert, | 11 | ··˘/···/˘/˘ |
| Though He may seem to overact His part: | 10 | ·····/˘··· |
| Sometimes He strikes us more than flesh can bear; | 10 | ˘/········ |
| But yet still less than grace can suffer here. | 10 | ·······/˘· |
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.