The Talk of the Echoes: A Fragment
When the cock crows loud from the glen,And the moor-cock chirrs from the heather,What hear ye and see ye then,Ye children of air and ether?
1st Echo.A thunder as of waves at the rising of the moon,And a darkness on the graves though the day is at its noon.
About this text
The Talk of the Echoes: A Fragment is in the public domain. This text is taken from The poetical works of George MacDonald in two volumes — Volume 2, Project Gutenberg ebook #9984; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: George MacDonald, The Talk of the Echoes: A Fragment, in A Microcosm in Terza Rima, and Other Poems (1893), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #9984, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/macdonald-poems/a-fragment.html, id L22420.
Form and metre
The Talk of the Echoes: A Fragment is 7 lines in 2 stanzas. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 73%).
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- glenA · heather · thenA · ether
- 2 -AA echo · moonA · noonA
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 |
|---|---|---|
| When the cock crows loud from the glen, | 8 | ········ |
| And the moor-cock chirrs from the heather, | 9 | ·······/˘ |
| What hear ye and see ye then, | 7 | ······· |
| Ye children of air and ether? | 8 | ·/˘···/˘ |
| 1st Echo. | 3 | ·/˘ |
| A thunder as of waves at the rising of the moon, | 13 | ·/˘·····/˘··· |
| And a darkness on the graves though the day is at its noon. | 14 | ··/˘·········· |
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.