213. God's Price and Man's Price

Robert Herrick (1591–1674) · 1648

iambic tetrameter · 2 lines · from Hesperides

God bought man here with His heart's blood expense;And man sold God here for base thirty pence.

About this text

213. God's Price and Man's Price 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, 213. God's Price and Man's Price, in Hesperides (1648), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #22421, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/herrick-hesperides/213-god-s-price-and-man-s-price.html, id L06224.

Form and metre

213. God's Price and Man's Price is 2 lines in a single stanza. The lines average 10.0 syllables.

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. 1 AA expenseA · penceA
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.

LineSyl.Stress
God bought man here with His heart's blood expense;10········˘/
And man sold God here for base thirty pence.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.

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