A Cry in the Night
Wail, wail, wail,For the fleering world goes down:Into the song of the poet paleMixes the laugh of the clown.
Grim, grim, grim,Is the road we go to the dead;Yet we must on, for a Something dimPushes the soul ahead.
Where, where, where,Through the dust and shadow of thingsWill the fleeing Fates with their wild manes bearThese tribes of slaves and kings?
Words in this poem
- ahead adv.
- In or to the front; in advance; onward. [Pref. a- + head.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
A Cry in the Night is in the public domain. This text is taken from The man with the hoe, and other poems, Project Gutenberg ebook #67012; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Edwin Markham, A Cry in the Night, in The Man with the Hoe, and Other Poems (1899), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #67012, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/markham-man-with-hoe/a-cry-in-the-night.html, id L24775.
Form and metre
A Cry in the Night is 12 lines in 3 stanzas of 4 lines each. Every stanza rhymes ABAB. The metre is trochaic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 76%).
See other poems in trochaic 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 wailA · downB · paleA · clownB
- 2 ABAB grimA · deadB · dimA · aheadB
- 3 ABAB whereA · thingsB · bearA · kingsB
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 trochaic tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Wail, wail, wail, | 3 | ··· |
| For the fleering world goes down: | 7 | ··/˘··· |
| Into the song of the poet pale | 9 | ······/˘· |
| Mixes the laugh of the clown. | 7 | /˘····· |
| Grim, grim, grim, | 3 | ··· |
| Is the road we go to the dead; | 8 | ········ |
| Yet we must on, for a Something dim | 9 | ······/˘· |
| Pushes the soul ahead. | 6 | /˘··˘/ |
| Where, where, where, | 3 | ··· |
| Through the dust and shadow of things | 8 | ····/··· |
| Will the fleeing Fates with their wild manes bear | 10 | ··/˘······ |
| These tribes of slaves and kings? | 6 | ······ |
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.