Her Reserved Looks
LUCASTA, frown, and let me die,But smile, and see, I live;The sad indifference of your eyeBoth kills and doth reprieve.You hide our fate within its screen;We feel our judgment, ere we hear.So in one picture I have seenAn angel here, the devil there.
Words in this poem
- reprieve v. t.
- To delay the punishment of; to suspend the execution of sentence on; to give a respite to; to respite; as, to reprieve a criminal for thirty days. [OE. repreven to reject, disallow, OF. reprover to blame, reproach, condemn (pres. il reprueve), F. réprouver to disapprove, fr. L. reprobare to reject, condemn;]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Her Reserved Looks is in the public domain. This text is taken from Lucasta, Project Gutenberg ebook #703; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Richard Lovelace, Her Reserved Looks, in Lucasta (1649), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #703, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/lovelace-lucasta/her-reserved-looks.html, id L13028.
Form and metre
Her Reserved Looks is 8 lines in a single stanza. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 90%). 97% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 7.9 syllables. 25% of the lines run on without a stop at the line end.
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 A-A-BCBC dieA · live · eyeA · reprieve · screenB · hearC · seenB · thereC
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 |
|---|---|---|
| LUCASTA, frown, and let me die, | 8 | ········ |
| But smile, and see, I live; | 6 | ······ |
| The sad indifference of your eye | 9 | ··˘/˘˘··· |
| Both kills and doth reprieve. | 6 | ····˘/ |
| You hide our fate within its screen; | 9 | ··/˘····· |
| We feel our judgment, ere we hear. | 9 | ··/˘/˘··· |
| So in one picture I have seen | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| An angel here, the devil there. | 8 | ·/˘··/˘· |
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.