A Night Prayer
May the will of God be done by us,May the death of the saints be won by us,And the light of the kingdom begun in us;May Jesus, the Child, be beside my bed,May the Lamb of mercy uplift my head,May the Virgin her heavenly brightness shed,And Michael be steward of my soul!
Words in this poem
- uplift v. t.
- To lift or raise aloft; to raise; to elevate; as, to uplift the arm; to uplift a rock.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
A Night Prayer is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Poem-Book of the Gael Translations from Irish Gaelic Poetry into English Prose and Verse, Project Gutenberg ebook #46917; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Eleanor Hull, A Night Prayer, in The Poem-Book of the Gael (1912), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #46917, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/hull-gael/a-night-prayer.html, id L11748.
Form and metre
A Night Prayer is 7 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets, 57% of the lines: heroic couplets. The metre is iambic pentameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 71%). 88% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 9.9 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 AAABBB- usA · usA · usA · bedB · headB · shedB · soul
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 |
|---|---|---|
| May the will of God be done by us, | 9 | ········· |
| May the death of the saints be won by us, | 10 | ·········· |
| And the light of the kingdom begun in us; | 11 | ·····/˘/˘·· |
| May Jesus, the Child, be beside my bed, | 10 | ·/˘···˘/·· |
| May the Lamb of mercy uplift my head, | 10 | ····/˘/˘·· |
| May the Virgin her heavenly brightness shed, | 10 | ··/˘·/˘/˘· |
| And Michael be steward of my soul! | 9 | ·/˘·/˘··· |
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.