Sanazar's Hexastick
In Adriatick waves when Neptune saw,The city stand, and give the seas a law:Now i' th' Tarpeian tow'rs Jove rival me,And Mars his walls impregnable, said he;Let seas to Tyber yield; view both their ods!You'l grant that built by men, but this by gods.
Words in this poem
- tarpeian a.
- Pertaining to or designating a rock or peak of the Capitoline hill, Rome, from which condemned criminals were hurled.
- jove n.
- The chief divinity of the ancient Romans; Jupiter. [L. Jupiter, gen. Jovis, OL. Jovis, nom. & gen. for Djovis; akin to E. Tuesday. See Tuesday, and cf. Jupiter.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Sanazar's Hexastick 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, Sanazar's Hexastick, in Lucasta (1649), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #703, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/lovelace-lucasta/sanazar-s-hexastick.html, id L13071.
Form and metre
Sanazar's Hexastick 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 90%). 96% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 9.8 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 sawA · lawA · meB · heB · odsC · godsC
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 |
|---|---|---|
| In Adriatick waves when Neptune saw, | 9 | ······/˘· |
| The city stand, and give the seas a law: | 10 | ·/˘······· |
| Now i' th' Tarpeian tow'rs Jove rival me, | 10 | ··˘/˘··/˘· |
| And Mars his walls impregnable, said he; | 10 | ····˘/˘˘·· |
| Let seas to Tyber yield; view both their ods! | 10 | ·········· |
| You'l grant that built by men, but this by gods. | 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.