Farewell
Bright shower of lambent butterflies,Soft cloud of murmuring bees,O fragile storm of sighing leavesAdrift upon the breeze!
Wild birds with eager wings outspreadTo seek an alien sky,Sweet comrades of a lyric spring.My little songs, good-bye !
Words in this poem
- lambent a.
- Playing on the surface; touching lightly; gliding over. [L. lambens, -enlis, p. pr. of lambere to lick; akin to lap. See Lap to drink by licking.]
- adrift adv.
- Floating at random; in a drifting condition; at the mercy of wind and waves. Also fig. [Pref. a- (for on) + drift.]
- outspread v. t.
- To spread out; to expand; -- usually as a past part. or adj.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Farewell is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Bird of Time: Songs of Life, Death & the Spring (London: William Heinemann; New York: John Lane Company, 1912), Wikisource; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Sarojini Naidu, Farewell, in The Bird of Time: Songs of Life, Death & the Spring (1912), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/naidu-bird-of-time/farewell.html, id L27560.
Form and metre
Farewell is 8 lines in 2 stanzas of 4 lines each. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 91%).
See 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 -A-A butterflies · beesA · leaves · breezeA
- 2 -A-A outspread · skyA · spring · byeA
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Bright shower of lambent butterflies, | 9 | ·/˘·/˘/˘· |
| Soft cloud of murmuring bees, | 7 | ···/˘˘· |
| O fragile storm of sighing leaves | 8 | ·/˘··/˘· |
| Adrift upon the breeze! | 6 | ˘/···· |
| Wild birds with eager wings outspread | 8 | ···/˘·˘/ |
| To seek an alien sky, | 7 | ···/˘˘· |
| Sweet comrades of a lyric spring. | 8 | ·/···/˘· |
| My little songs, good-bye ! | 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.