81. Go Tokudai-ji Sadaijin
The cuckoo's echo dies away,And lo! the branch is bare;I only see the morning moon,Whose light is fading thereBefore the daylight's glare.
Words in this poem
- fading n.
- An Irish dance; also, the burden of a song.
- glare v. i.
- To shine with a bright, dazzling light. [OE. glaren, gloren; cf. AS. glær amber, LG. glaren to glow or burn like coals, D. gloren to glimmer; prob. akin to E. glass.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
81. Go Tokudai-ji Sadaijin 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, 81. Go Tokudai-ji Sadaijin, in A Hundred Verses from Old Japan (1909), text of Internet Archive, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/hyakunin-isshu/81.html, id L28566.
Form and metre
81. Go Tokudai-ji Sadaijin 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 awayx · barea · moonx · therea · glarea
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 |
|---|---|---|
| The cuckoo's echo dies away, | 8 | ·/˘/˘·˘/ |
| And lo! the branch is bare; | 6 | ······ |
| I only see the morning moon, | 8 | ·/˘··/˘· |
| Whose light is fading there | 6 | ···/˘· |
| Before the daylight's glare. | 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.