The Dead Master
Amid earth's vagrant noises, he caught the note sublime:To-day around him surges from the silences of TimeA flood of nobler music, like a river deep and broad,Fit song for heroes gathered in the banquet-hall of God.
Words in this poem
- amid prep.
- In the midst or middle of; surrounded or encompassed by; among. [OE. amidde, amiddes, on midden, AS. on middan, in the middle, fr. midde the middle. The s is an adverbial ending, originally marking the genitive; the t is a la]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
The Dead Master is in the public domain. This text is taken from In Flanders Fields, and Other Poems, Project Gutenberg ebook #353; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: John McCrae, The Dead Master, in In Flanders Fields, and Other Poems (1919), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #353, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/mccrae-flanders/the-dead-master.html, id L17051.
Form and metre
The Dead Master is 4 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets, 50% of the lines. The lines average 13.5 syllables.
See other poems in rhyming couplets.
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-- sublimeA · timeA · broad · god
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Amid earth's vagrant noises, he caught the note sublime: | 13 | ˘/·/˘/˘····˘/ |
| To-day around him surges from the silences of Time | 13 | ·····/˘··/˘·· |
| A flood of nobler music, like a river deep and broad, | 14 | ···/˘/˘··/˘··· |
| Fit song for heroes gathered in the banquet-hall of God. | 14 | ···/˘/˘··/˘··· |
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.