Second Movement
Pale violin music whiffs across the moon,A pale smoke of violin music blows over the moon,Cherry petals fall and flutter,And the white Pierrot,Wreathed in the smoke of the violins,Splashed with cherry petals falling, falling,Claws a grave for himself in the fresh earthWith his finger-nails.
About this text
Second Movement is in the public domain. This text is taken from Men, Women and Ghosts, Project Gutenberg ebook #841; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Amy Lowell, Second Movement, in Men, Women and Ghosts (1916), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #841, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/lowell-amy-men-women-ghosts/second-movement.html, id L24287.
Form and metre
Second Movement is 8 lines in a single stanza. The metre is trochaic pentameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 78%).
See other poems in trochaic 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 AA------ moonA · moonA · flutter · pierrot · violins · falling · earth · nails
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 trochaic pentameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Pale violin music whiffs across the moon, | 10 | ·˘//˘·˘/·· |
| A pale smoke of violin music blows over the moon, | 12 | ····˘//˘···· |
| Cherry petals fall and flutter, | 8 | /˘/˘··/˘ |
| And the white Pierrot, | 5 | ····· |
| Wreathed in the smoke of the violins, | 9 | ······˘˘/ |
| Splashed with cherry petals falling, falling, | 10 | ··/˘/˘/˘/˘ |
| Claws a grave for himself in the fresh earth | 10 | ····˘/···· |
| With his finger-nails. | 5 | ··/˘· |
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.