From the Spanish
Twenty years go by on noiseless feet,He returns, and once again they meet,She exclaims, "Good heavens! and is that he?"He mutters, "My God! and that is she!"
About this text
From the Spanish is in the public domain. This text is taken from Fifty Years, & Other Poems, Project Gutenberg ebook #17884; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: James Weldon Johnson, From the Spanish, in Fifty Years and Other Poems (1917), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #17884, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/johnson-fifty-years/from-the-spanish.html, id L08301.
Form and metre
From the Spanish is 4 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets: heroic couplets. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic pentameter. 100% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 9.2 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 AABB feetA · meetA · heB · sheB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Twenty years go by on noiseless feet, | 9 | /˘····/˘· |
| He returns, and once again they meet, | 9 | ·˘/··˘/·· |
| She exclaims, "Good heavens! and is that he?" | 10 | ·˘/·/˘···· |
| He mutters, "My God! and that is she!" | 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.