A Fleeting Glimpse of a Village
How graceful the picture! the life, the repose!The sunbeam that plays on the porchstone wide;And the shadow that fleets o'er the stream that flows,And the soft blue sky with the hill's green side.
Words in this poem
- sunbeam n.
- A beam or ray of the sun. [AS. sunnebeam.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
A Fleeting Glimpse of a Village is in the public domain. This text is taken from Poems, Project Gutenberg ebook #8775, the various hands translation; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Victor Hugo, A Fleeting Glimpse of a Village, in Poems (1888), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #8775, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/hugo-poems/a-fleeting-glimpse-of-a-village.html, id L26865.
Form and metre
A Fleeting Glimpse of a Village is 4 lines in a single stanza. It rhymes ABAB. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic pentameter.
See 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 ABAB reposeA · wideB · flowsA · sideB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| How graceful the picture! the life, the repose! | 11 | ·/˘·/˘···˘/ |
| The sunbeam that plays on the porchstone wide; | 10 | ·/········ |
| And the shadow that fleets o'er the stream that flows, | 11 | ··/········ |
| And the soft blue sky with the hill's green side. | 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.