The Affront of Corpes CXXIX
Their cloaks and furs of ermine along with them they bare,In their shifts and tunics, fainting, they left them there behind,A prey to every wild-fowl and beast of savage kind.
Know you, for dead, not living, they left them in such cheer.Good hap it were if now the Cid, Roy Diaz, should appear.
About this text
The Affront of Corpes CXXIX is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Lay of the Cid, Project Gutenberg ebook #6088, the R. Selden Rose and Leonard Bacon 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: Anonymous, The Affront of Corpes CXXIX, in The Lay of the Cid (1919), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #6088, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/lay-of-the-cid/the-affront-of-corpes-cxxix.html, id L15133.
Form and metre
The Affront of Corpes CXXIX is 5 lines in 2 verse paragraphs. It is in rhyming couplets, 80% of the lines. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic heptameter. 86% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 13.6 syllables.
See other poems in rhyming couplets, other poems in iambic heptameter.
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 bare · behindA · kindA
- 2 AA cheerA · appearA
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 heptameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Their cloaks and furs of ermine along with them they bare, | 13 | ·····/˘˘/···· |
| In their shifts and tunics, fainting, they left them there behind, | 14 | ····/˘/˘······ |
| A prey to every wild-fowl and beast of savage kind. | 14 | ···/˘˘·····/˘· |
| Know you, for dead, not living, they left them in such cheer. | 13 | ·····/˘······ |
| Good hap it were if now the Cid, Roy Diaz, should appear. | 14 | ·········/··˘/ |
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.