Love's Treacherous Pool
Young maiden, true love is a pool all mirroring clear,Where coquettish girls come to linger in long delight,For it banishes afar from the face all the clouds that besmearThe soul truly bright;But tempts you to ruffle its surface; drawing your footTo subtilest sinking! and farther and farther the brinkThat vainly you snatch--for repentance, 'tis weed without root,--And struggling, you sink!
Words in this poem
- coquettish a.
- Practicing or exhibiting coquetry; alluring; enticing.
- afar adv.
- At, to, or from a great distance; far away; -- often used with from preceding, or off following; as, he was seen from afar; I saw him afar off. [Pref. a-.(for on or of) + far.]
- brink n.
- The edge, margin, or border of a steep place, as of a precipice; a bank or edge, as of a river or pit; a verge; a border; as, the brink of a chasm. Also Fig. [Dan. brink edge, verge; akin to Sw. brink declivity, hill, Icel. brekka; cf. LG. brink a grassy hill, W. bryn hill, bryncyn hillock.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Love's Treacherous Pool 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, Love's Treacherous Pool, in Poems (1888), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #8775, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/hugo-poems/love-s-treacherous-pool.html, id L26774.
Form and metre
Love's Treacherous Pool is 8 lines in a single stanza. 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-C-C clearA · delightB · besmearA · brightB · foot · brinkC · root · sinkC
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Young maiden, true love is a pool all mirroring clear, | 12 | ·/˘······/˘· |
| Where coquettish girls come to linger in long delight, | 13 | ·˘/˘···/˘··˘/ |
| For it banishes afar from the face all the clouds that besmear | 15 | ··/˘˘/·······˘/ |
| The soul truly bright; | 5 | ··/˘· |
| But tempts you to ruffle its surface; drawing your foot | 13 | ····/˘·/˘/˘·· |
| To subtilest sinking! and farther and farther the brink | 14 | ····/˘·/˘·/˘·· |
| That vainly you snatch--for repentance, 'tis weed without root,-- | 14 | ·/˘···˘/˘····· |
| And struggling, you sink! | 6 | ·/˘˘·· |
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.