A Dream of Spring
Last night within my chamber's gloom some vague light breath of SpringCame wandering and whispering, and bade my soul take wing.
A hundred moonlit miles away the Chiang crept to sea;O keeper of my heart, I came by Chiang's ford to thee.
It lingered but a moment's space, that dream of Spring, and died;Yet as my head the pillows pressed, my soul had found thy side.
Oh! Chiang Nan's a hundred miles, yet in a moment's spaceI've flown away to Chiang Nan and touched a dreaming face.
Words in this poem
- bade
- A form of the pat tense of Bid.
- moonlit a.
- Illumined by the moon.
- flown a.
- Flushed, inflated.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
A Dream of Spring is in the public domain. This text is taken from A Lute of Jade, Project Gutenberg ebook #390, the L. Cranmer-Byng 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: Various, A Dream of Spring, in A Lute of Jade (1909), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #390, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/lute-of-jade/a-dream-of-spring.html, id L15571.
Form and metre
A Dream of Spring is 8 lines in 4 stanzas of 2 lines each. It is in rhyming couplets. The metre is fourteeners, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 85%). 88% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 13.2 syllables. 25% of the lines run on without a stop at the line end.
See other poems in rhyming couplets, other poems in fourteeners.
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 springA · wingA
- 2 AA seaA · theeA
- 3 AA diedA · sideA
- 4 AA spaceA · faceA
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 fourteeners. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Last night within my chamber's gloom some vague light breath of Spring | 14 | ·····/˘······· |
| Came wandering and whispering, and bade my soul take wing. | 12 | ·/˘·/˘······ |
| A hundred moonlit miles away the Chiang crept to sea; | 13 | ·/˘/··˘/····· |
| O keeper of my heart, I came by Chiang's ford to thee. | 13 | ·/˘·········· |
| It lingered but a moment's space, that dream of Spring, and died; | 14 | ·/˘··/˘······· |
| Yet as my head the pillows pressed, my soul had found thy side. | 14 | ·····/˘······· |
| Oh! Chiang Nan's a hundred miles, yet in a moment's space | 13 | ····/˘····/˘· |
| I've flown away to Chiang Nan and touched a dreaming face. | 13 | ··˘/······/˘· |
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.