18. Fujiwara no Toshi-yuki Ason
To-night on Sumi-no-ye beachThe waves alone draw near;And, as we wander by the cliffs,No prying eyes shall peer,No one shall dream we're here.
Words in this poem
- prying a.
- Inspecting closely or impertinently.
- shall v. i.
- To owe; to be under obligation for. [OE. shal, schal, imp. sholde, scholde, AS. scal, sceal, I am obliged, imp. scolde, sceolde, inf. sculan; akin to OS. skulan, pres. skal, imp. skolda, D. zullen,]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
18. Fujiwara no Toshi-yuki Ason is in the public domain. This text is taken from A Hundred Verses from Old Japan (the Hyaku-nin-isshiu), Internet Archive, the William N. Porter 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: Various, 18. Fujiwara no Toshi-yuki Ason, in A Hundred Verses from Old Japan (1909), text of Internet Archive, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/hyakunin-isshu/18.html, id L28503.
Form and metre
18. Fujiwara no Toshi-yuki Ason is 5 lines in a single stanza. It rhymes xaxaa. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic trimeter.
See other poems in iambic trimeter.
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 xaxaa beachx · neara · cliffsx · peera · herea
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 trimeter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| To-night on Sumi-no-ye beach | 8 | ········ |
| The waves alone draw near; | 6 | ··˘/·· |
| And, as we wander by the cliffs, | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| No prying eyes shall peer, | 6 | ·/˘··· |
| No one shall dream we're here. | 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.