Mother Nature
Beautiful mother is busy all day,So busy she neither can sing nor say;But lovely thoughts, in a ceaseless flow,Through her eyes, and her ears, and her bosom go--Motion, sight, and sound, and scent,Weaving a royal, rich content.
When night is come, and her children sleep,Beautiful mother her watch doth keep;With glowing stars in her dusky hairDown she sits to her music rare;And her instrument that never fails,Is the hearts and the throats of her nightingales.
Words in this poem
- ceaseless a.
- Without pause or end; incessant.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Mother Nature 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, Mother Nature, in A Microcosm in Terza Rima, and Other Poems (1893), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #9984, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/macdonald-poems/mother-nature.html, id L22334.
Form and metre
Mother Nature is 12 lines in 2 stanzas of 6 lines each. Every stanza rhymes AABBCC. 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 AABBCC dayA · sayA · flowB · goB · scentC · contentC
- 2 AABBCC sleepA · keepA · hairB · rareB · failsC · nightingalesC
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Beautiful mother is busy all day, | 10 | /˘˘/˘·/˘·· |
| So busy she neither can sing nor say; | 10 | ·/˘·/˘···· |
| But lovely thoughts, in a ceaseless flow, | 9 | ·/˘···/˘· |
| Through her eyes, and her ears, and her bosom go-- | 11 | ········/˘· |
| Motion, sight, and sound, and scent, | 7 | /˘····· |
| Weaving a royal, rich content. | 8 | /˘·/˘·/˘ |
| When night is come, and her children sleep, | 9 | ······/˘· |
| Beautiful mother her watch doth keep; | 9 | /˘˘/˘···· |
| With glowing stars in her dusky hair | 9 | ·/˘···/˘· |
| Down she sits to her music rare; | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| And her instrument that never fails, | 9 | ··/˘˘·/˘· |
| Is the hearts and the throats of her nightingales. | 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.