The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin
It was not in the open fightWe threw away the sword,But in the lonely watchingIn the darkness by the ford.The waters lapped, the night-wind blew,Full-armed the Fear was born and grew,From panic in the night.
About this text
The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin 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, The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin, in Songs from Books (1912), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #15529, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/kipling-songs-from-books/the-conversion-of-aurelian-mcgoggin.html, id L20298.
Form and metre
The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin is 7 lines in a single stanza. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 94%).
See other poems in iambic tetrameter.
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 AB-BCCA fightA · swordB · watching · fordB · blewC · grewC · nightA
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 tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| It was not in the open fight | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| We threw away the sword, | 6 | ··˘/·· |
| But in the lonely watching | 7 | ···/˘/˘ |
| In the darkness by the ford. | 7 | ··/˘··· |
| The waters lapped, the night-wind blew, | 8 | ·/˘····· |
| Full-armed the Fear was born and grew, | 8 | ········ |
| From panic in the night. | 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.