97. Duty to Tyrants
Good princes must be pray'd for; for the badThey must be borne with, and in rev'rence had.Do they first pill thee, next pluck off thy skin?Good children kiss the rods that punish sin.Touch not the tyrant; let the gods aloneTo strike him dead that but usurps a throne.
About this text
97. Duty to Tyrants 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, 97. Duty to Tyrants, in Hesperides (1648), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #22421, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/herrick-hesperides/97-duty-to-tyrants.html, id L05158.
Form and metre
97. Duty to Tyrants is 6 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets: heroic couplets. The metre is iambic pentameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 86%). 100% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 10.0 syllables.
See other poems in heroic couplets, other poems in iambic pentameter.
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 badA · hadA · skinB · sinB · aloneC · throneC
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 pentameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Good princes must be pray'd for; for the bad | 10 | ·/˘······· |
| They must be borne with, and in rev'rence had. | 10 | ·········· |
| Do they first pill thee, next pluck off thy skin? | 10 | ·········· |
| Good children kiss the rods that punish sin. | 10 | ·/˘····/˘· |
| Touch not the tyrant; let the gods alone | 10 | ···/˘···˘/ |
| To strike him dead that but usurps a throne. | 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.