Jour Des Morts (Cimetière Montparnasse)

Charlotte Mew (1869–1928) · 1916

iambic hexameter · 6 lines · from The Farmer's Bride

Sweetheart, is this the last of all our posiesAnd little festivals, my flowers are theyBut white and wistful ghosts of gayer rosesShut with you in this grim garden? Not to-day,Ah! no! come out with me before the grey gate closesIt is your fête and here is your bouquet!

Words in this poem

wistful a.
Longing; wishful; desirous. [For wishful; perhaps influenced by wistly, which is probably corrupted from OE. wisly certainly (from Icel. viss certain, akin to E. wit). See Wish.]

Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.

About this text

Jour Des Morts (Cimetière Montparnasse) is in the public domain. This text is taken from The farmer's bride, Project Gutenberg ebook #71305; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.

Cite as: Charlotte Mew, Jour Des Morts (Cimetière Montparnasse), in The Farmer's Bride (1916), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #71305, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/mew-farmers-bride/jour-des-morts-cimeti-re-montparnasse.html, id L02467.

Form and metre

Jour Des Morts (Cimetière Montparnasse) is 6 lines in a single stanza. The metre is iambic hexameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 85%). 97% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 10.7 syllables. 2 lines end on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending.

See other poems in iambic hexameter.

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. 1 -ABABA posies · theyA · rosesB · dayA · closesB · bouquetA
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 hexameter. How this is done.

LineSyl.Stress
Sweetheart, is this the last of all our posies10/·······/·
And little festivals, my flowers are they9·/˘/˘·/··
But white and wistful ghosts of gayer roses11···/˘··/˘/˘
Shut with you in this grim garden? Not to-day,11······/˘···
Ah! no! come out with me before the grey gate closes13···········/˘
It is your fête and here is your bouquet!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.

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