Hope and Patience
An unborn bird lies crumpled and curled,A-dreaming of the world.
Round it, for castle-wall, a shellIs guarding it well.
Hope is the bird with its dim sensations;The shell that keeps it alive is Patience.
Words in this poem
- unborn a.
- Not born; no yet brought into life; being still to appear; future.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Hope and Patience 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, Hope and Patience, in A Microcosm in Terza Rima, and Other Poems (1893), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #9984, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/macdonald-poems/hope-and-patience.html, id L22317.
Form and metre
Hope and Patience is 6 lines in 3 stanzas of 2 lines each. It is in rhyming couplets, 67% of the lines: heroic couplets. The metre is iambic pentameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 79%).
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 AA curledA · worldA
- 2 AA shellA · wellA
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 |
|---|---|---|
| An unborn bird lies crumpled and curled, | 10 | ·//··/˘˘·· |
| A-dreaming of the world. | 6 | ·/˘··· |
| Round it, for castle-wall, a shell | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| Is guarding it well. | 5 | ·/˘·· |
| Hope is the bird with its dim sensations; | 10 | ·······˘/˘ |
| The shell that keeps it alive is Patience. | 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.