To the Cannon "Victor Hugo"
Thou deadly crater, moulded by my muse,Cast thou thy bronze into my bowed and wounded heart,And let my soul its vengeance to thy bronze impart!
Words in this poem
- crater n.
- The basinlike opening or mouth of a volcano, through which the chief eruption comes; similarly, the mouth of a gevser, about which a cone of silica is often built up. [L. crater, cratera, a mixing vessel, the mouth of a volcano, Gr. ir to cook, Crail, in Holy Grail.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
To the Cannon "Victor Hugo" 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, To the Cannon "Victor Hugo", in Poems (1888), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #8775, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/hugo-poems/to-the-cannon-victor-hugo.html, id L26843.
Form and metre
To the Cannon "Victor Hugo" is 3 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 -AA muse · heartA · impartA
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Thou deadly crater, moulded by my muse, | 10 | ·/˘/˘/˘··· |
| Cast thou thy bronze into my bowed and wounded heart, | 12 | ·········/˘· |
| And let my soul its vengeance to thy bronze impart! | 12 | ·····/˘···˘/ |
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.