Transience
Nay, do not grieve tho' life be full of sadness,Dawn will not veil her splendour for your grief,Nor spring deny their bright, appointed beautyTo lotus blossom and ashoka leaf.
Nay, do not pine, tho' life be dark with trouble,Time will not pause or tarry on his way;To-day that seems so long, so strange, so bitter,Will soon be some forgotten yesterday.
Nay, do not weep; new hopes, new dreams, new faces,The unspent joy of all the unborn years,Will prove your heart a traitor to its sorrow,And make your eyes unfaithful to their tears.
Words in this poem
- sadness n.
- Heaviness; firmness.
- splendour n.
- Great brightness; brilliant luster; brilliancy; as, the splendor ot the sun. B. Jonson. [L. fr. splendere to shine: cf. F. splendeur.]
- unborn a.
- Not born; no yet brought into life; being still to appear; future.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Transience 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, Transience, in The Bird of Time: Songs of Life, Death & the Spring (1912), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/naidu-bird-of-time/transience.html, id L27550.
Form and metre
Transience is 12 lines in 3 stanzas of 4 lines each. The metre is iambic pentameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 90%).
See other poems in iambic pentameter.
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 sadness · griefA · beauty · leafA
- 2 -A-A trouble · wayA · bitter · yesterdayA
- 3 -A-A faces · yearsA · sorrow · tearsA
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 pentameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Nay, do not grieve tho' life be full of sadness, | 11 | ·········/˘ |
| Dawn will not veil her splendour for your grief, | 10 | ·····/˘··· |
| Nor spring deny their bright, appointed beauty | 11 | ··˘/··˘/˘/˘ |
| To lotus blossom and ashoka leaf. | 10 | ·/˘/˘····· |
| Nay, do not pine, tho' life be dark with trouble, | 11 | ·········/˘ |
| Time will not pause or tarry on his way; | 10 | ·····/˘··· |
| To-day that seems so long, so strange, so bitter, | 11 | ·········/˘ |
| Will soon be some forgotten yesterday. | 10 | ····˘/˘/˘· |
| Nay, do not weep; new hopes, new dreams, new faces, | 11 | ·········/˘ |
| The unspent joy of all the unborn years, | 10 | ·˘/····//· |
| Will prove your heart a traitor to its sorrow, | 11 | ·····/˘··/˘ |
| And make your eyes unfaithful to their 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.