43. Chū-nagon Yatsu-tada
How desolate my former life,Those dismal years, ere yetI chanced to see thee face to face;'Twere better to forgetThose days before we met.
Words in this poem
- dismal a.
- Fatal; ill-omened; unlucky. [Formerly a noun; e. g., "I trow it was in the dismalle." Chaucer. Of uncertain origin; but perh. (as suggested by Skeat) from OF. disme, F. dîme, tithe, the phr]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
43. Chū-nagon Yatsu-tada 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, 43. Chū-nagon Yatsu-tada, in A Hundred Verses from Old Japan (1909), text of Internet Archive, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/hyakunin-isshu/43.html, id L28528.
Form and metre
43. Chū-nagon Yatsu-tada 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 lifex · yeta · facex · forgeta · meta
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 |
|---|---|---|
| How desolate my former life, | 7 | ·/˘·/˘· |
| Those dismal years, ere yet | 6 | ·/˘··· |
| I chanced to see thee face to face; | 8 | ········ |
| 'Twere better to forget | 6 | ·/˘·˘/ |
| Those days before we met. | 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.