Knight Roland
Why does she kiss me, Father John?She is my true love truly won!Under my helm is room for one,But the molten lead-streams trickle and runFrom my roof-tree, burning under the sun;No corn to burn, we had eaten the corn,There was no waste of the golden corn.
About this text
Knight Roland is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems, Project Gutenberg ebook #22650; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: William Morris, Knight Roland, in The Defence of Guenevere (1858), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #22650, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/morris-defence-guenevere/knight-roland.html, id L07155.
Form and metre
Knight Roland is 7 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets, 57% of the lines: octosyllabic couplets. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 76%). 100% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 9.0 syllables.
See other poems in octosyllabic couplets, 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 AABBBCC johnA · wonA · oneB · runB · sunB · cornC · cornC
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Why does she kiss me, Father John? | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| She is my true love truly won! | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| Under my helm is room for one, | 8 | ········ |
| But the molten lead-streams trickle and run | 10 | ··/˘··/˘·· |
| From my roof-tree, burning under the sun; | 10 | ····/˘···· |
| No corn to burn, we had eaten the corn, | 10 | ······/˘·· |
| There was no waste of the golden corn. | 9 | ······/˘· |
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.