220. Prescience
God's prescience makes none sinful; but th' offenceOf man's the chief cause of God's prescience.
Words in this poem
- offence n.
- The act of offending in any sense; esp., a crime or a sin, an affront or an injury. [F., fr. L. offensa. See Offend.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
220. Prescience 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, 220. Prescience, in Hesperides (1648), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #22421, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/herrick-hesperides/220-prescience.html, id L06231.
Form and metre
220. Prescience is 2 lines in a single stanza. The lines average 10.0 syllables. 1 line ends on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending.
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.
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's prescience makes none sinful; but th' offence | 10 | ·/˘··/˘·˘/ |
| Of man's the chief cause of God's prescience. | 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.