To Lady Firebrace at Bury Assizes
At length, must Suffolk beauties shine in vain,So long renown'd in B--n's deathless strain?Thy charms, at least, fair Firebrace, might inspireSome zealous bard to wake the sleeping lyre;For, such thy beauteous mind and lovely face,Thou seem'st at once, bright nymph, a muse and grace.
Words in this poem
- deathless a.
- Not subject to death, destruction, or extinction; immortal; undying; imperishable; as, deathless beings; deathless fame.
- beauteous a.
- Full of beauty; beautiful; very handsome. [Mostly poetic] -- Beau"te*ous*ly, adv. --
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
To Lady Firebrace at Bury Assizes is in the public domain. This text is taken from Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 (The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes, 1825), Project Gutenberg ebook #10835; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Samuel Johnson, To Lady Firebrace at Bury Assizes, in Poems (1825), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #10835, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/johnson-poems/to-lady-firebrace-at-bury-assizes.html, id L27147.
Form and metre
To Lady Firebrace at Bury Assizes is 6 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets: heroic couplets. The metre is iambic pentameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 91%).
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 AABBCC vainA · strainA · inspireB · lyreB · faceC · graceC
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 |
|---|---|---|
| At length, must Suffolk beauties shine in vain, | 10 | ···/˘/˘··· |
| So long renown'd in B--n's deathless strain? | 10 | ··˘/···/˘· |
| Thy charms, at least, fair Firebrace, might inspire | 11 | ·········˘/ |
| Some zealous bard to wake the sleeping lyre; | 10 | ·/˘····/˘· |
| For, such thy beauteous mind and lovely face, | 11 | ···/˘˘··/˘· |
| Thou seem'st at once, bright nymph, a muse and grace. | 10 | ·········· |
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.