Life's Handicap
The doors were wide, the story saith,Out of the night came the patient wraith.He might not speak, and he could not stirA hair of the Baron's minniver.Speechless and strengthless, a shadow thin,He roved the castle to find his kin.And oh! 'twas a piteous sight to seeThe dumb ghost follow his enemy!
Words in this poem
- saith
- 3d pers. sing. pres. of Say.
- wraith n.
- An apparition of a person in his exact likeness, seen before death, or a little after; hence, an apparition; a specter; a vision; an unreal image. [Scot. wraith, warth; probably originally, a guardian angel, from Icel. vörthr a warden, guardian, akin to E. ward. See Ward a guard.]
- speechless a.
- Destitute or deprived of the faculty of speech.
- strengthless a.
- Destitute of strength. Boyle.
- ghost n.
- The spirit; the soul of man. [OE. gast, gost, soul, spirit, AS. gast breath, spirit, soul; akin to OS. g spirit, soul, D. geest, G. geist, and prob. to E. gaze, ghastly.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Life's Handicap is in the public domain. This text is taken from Songs from Books, Project Gutenberg ebook #15529; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Rudyard Kipling, Life's Handicap, in Songs from Books (1912), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #15529, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/kipling-songs-from-books/life-s-handicap.html, id L20350.
Form and metre
Life's Handicap is 8 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets, 50% of the lines: heroic couplets. The metre is iambic pentameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 75%).
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 AA--BB-- saithA · wraithA · stir · minniver · thinB · kinB · see · enemy
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 |
|---|---|---|
| The doors were wide, the story saith, | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| Out of the night came the patient wraith. | 9 | ······/˘· |
| He might not speak, and he could not stir | 9 | ········· |
| A hair of the Baron's minniver. | 9 | ····/˘··· |
| Speechless and strengthless, a shadow thin, | 9 | /˘·/˘·/·· |
| He roved the castle to find his kin. | 9 | ···/˘···· |
| And oh! 'twas a piteous sight to see | 10 | ····/˘˘··· |
| The dumb ghost follow his enemy! | 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.