245. No Coming to God Without Christ
Good and great God! how should I fearTo come to Thee if Christ not there!Could I but think He would not bePresent to plead my cause for me,To hell I'd rather run than IWould see Thy face and He not by.
About this text
245. No Coming to God Without Christ 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, 245. No Coming to God Without Christ, in Hesperides (1648), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #22421, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/herrick-hesperides/245-no-coming-to-god-without-christ.html, id L06256.
Form and metre
245. No Coming to God Without Christ is 6 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets: octosyllabic couplets. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 87%). 100% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 8.0 syllables.
See other poems in octosyllabic couplets, 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 AABBCC fearA · thereA · beB · meB · iC · byC
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Good and great God! how should I fear | 8 | ········ |
| To come to Thee if Christ not there! | 8 | ········ |
| Could I but think He would not be | 8 | ········ |
| Present to plead my cause for me, | 8 | /˘······ |
| To hell I'd rather run than I | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| Would see Thy face and He not by. | 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.