Nasturtiums
Poignant and subtle and bitter perfume,Exquisite, luminous, passionate bloom,Your leaves interwoven of fragrance and fireAre Savitri's sorrow and Sita's desire,Draupadi's longing, Damayanti's fears,And sweetest Sakuntala's magical tears.
Words in this poem
- poignant a.
- Pricking; piercing; sharp; pungent. [F., p. pr. of poindre to sting, fr. L. pungere to prick, sting. See Pungent.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Nasturtiums 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, Nasturtiums, in The Bird of Time: Songs of Life, Death & the Spring (1912), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/naidu-bird-of-time/nasturtiums.html, id L27533.
Form and metre
Nasturtiums is 6 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets. The metre is anapaestic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 92%).
See other poems in rhyming couplets, other poems in anapaestic 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 AABBCC perfumeA · bloomA · fireB · desireB · fearsC · tearsC
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 anapaestic tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Poignant and subtle and bitter perfume, | 10 | /˘·/˘·/˘˘/ |
| Exquisite, luminous, passionate bloom, | 10 | /˘˘/˘˘/˘˘· |
| Your leaves interwoven of fragrance and fire | 11 | ···˘/˘·/˘·/ |
| Are Savitri's sorrow and Sita's desire, | 11 | ····/˘···˘/ |
| Draupadi's longing, Damayanti's fears, | 9 | ···/˘···· |
| And sweetest Sakuntala's magical tears. | 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.