Firelight
Playing in the fire and twilight together,My little son and I,Suddenly—woefully—I stoop to catch him.“Try, mother, try!”
Old Nurse Silence lifts a silent finger:“Hush! cease your play!”What happened? What in that tiny momentFlew away?
Words in this poem
- woefully adv.
- In a woeful manner; sorrowfully; mournfully; miserably; dolefully.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Firelight is in the public domain. This text is taken from Poems, Project Gutenberg ebook #59276; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Katherine Mansfield, Firelight, in Poems (1923), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #59276, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/mansfield-poems/firelight.html, id L27611.
Form and metre
Firelight is 8 lines in 2 stanzas of 4 lines each.
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 together · iA · him · tryA
- 2 -A-A finger · playA · moment · awayA
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. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Playing in the fire and twilight together, | 11 | /˘··/·/·˘/˘ |
| My little son and I, | 6 | ·/˘··· |
| Suddenly—woefully—I stoop to catch him. | 9 | /˘/˘····· |
| “Try, mother, try!” | 4 | ·/˘· |
| Old Nurse Silence lifts a silent finger: | 10 | ··/˘··/˘/˘ |
| “Hush! cease your play!” | 4 | ···· |
| What happened? What in that tiny moment | 10 | ·/˘···/˘/˘ |
| Flew away? | 3 | ·˘/ |
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.