Delia
Sweet as the tender fragrance that survives,When martyred flowers breathe out their little lives,Sweet as a song that once consoled our pain,But never will be sung to us again,Is thy remembrance. Now the hour of restHath come to thee. Sleep, darling; it is best.
About this text
Delia is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Project Gutenberg ebook #1365; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Delia, in The Complete Poetical Works (1839–1882), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #1365, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/longfellow-poems/delia.html, id L17795.
Form and metre
Delia 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 88%). 94% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 10.0 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 AABBCC survivesA · livesA · painB · againB · restC · bestC
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Sweet as the tender fragrance that survives, | 10 | ···/˘/˘·˘/ |
| When martyred flowers breathe out their little lives, | 10 | ·/˘/···/˘· |
| Sweet as a song that once consoled our pain, | 10 | ······˘//· |
| But never will be sung to us again, | 9 | ·/·····˘/ |
| Is thy remembrance. Now the hour of rest | 10 | ··˘/˘··/·· |
| Hath come to thee. Sleep, darling; it is best. | 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.