A Mood
My thoughts are like fire-flies, pulsing in moonlight;My heart like a silver cup, filled with red wine;My soul a pale gleaming horizon, whence soon lightWill flood the gold earth with a torrent divine.
About this text
A Mood 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, A Mood, in A Microcosm in Terza Rima, and Other Poems (1893), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #9984, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/macdonald-poems/a-mood.html, id L22386.
Form and metre
A Mood is 4 lines in a single stanza. It rhymes ABAB. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic tetrameter.
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 ABAB moonlightA · wineB · lightA · divineB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| My thoughts are like fire-flies, pulsing in moonlight; | 11 | ····/·/˘·/· |
| My heart like a silver cup, filled with red wine; | 11 | ····/˘····· |
| My soul a pale gleaming horizon, whence soon light | 12 | ····/˘˘/˘··· |
| Will flood the gold earth with a torrent divine. | 11 | ·······/˘˘/ |
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.