Holyrood Palace
Palace and ruin, bless thee evermore!Grateful we bow thy gloomy tow'rs before;For the old King of France hath found in theeThat melancholy hospitalityWhich in their royal fortune's evil day,Stuarts and Bourbons to each other pay.
Words in this poem
- evermore adv.
- During eternity; always; forever; for an indefinite period; at all times; -- often used substantively with for.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Holyrood Palace 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, Holyrood Palace, in Poems (1888), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #8775, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/hugo-poems/holyrood-palace.html, id L26776.
Form and metre
Holyrood Palace is 6 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets, 67% of the lines: heroic couplets. The metre is iambic pentameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 89%).
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 AA--BB evermoreA · beforeA · thee · hospitality · dayB · payB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Palace and ruin, bless thee evermore! | 10 | /˘·/˘··/˘· |
| Grateful we bow thy gloomy tow'rs before; | 10 | /˘···/˘··· |
| For the old King of France hath found in thee | 10 | ·········· |
| That melancholy hospitality | 10 | ·/˘·˘·˘/˘˘ |
| Which in their royal fortune's evil day, | 10 | ···/˘/˘/˘· |
| Stuarts and Bourbons to each other pay. | 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.