Life
Children, ye have not lived, to you it seemsLife is a lovely stalactite of dreams,Or carnival of careless joys that leapAbout your hearts like billows on the deepIn flames of amber and of amethyst.
Children, ye have not lived, ye but existTill some resistless hour shall rise and moveYour hearts to wake and hunger after love,And thirst with passionate longing for the thingsThat burn your brows with blood-red sufferings.
Till ye have battled with great grief and fears,And borne the conflict of dream-shattering years,Wounded with fierce desire and worn with strife,Children, ye have not lived: for this is life.
Words in this poem
- amethyst
- A variety of crystallized quartz, of a purple or bluish violet color, of different shades. It is much used as a jeweler's stone. [F. ametiste, amatiste, F. améthyste, L. amethystus, fr. Gr. Mead.]
- resistless a.
- Having no power to resist; making no opposition.
- shall v. i.
- To owe; to be under obligation for. [OE. shal, schal, imp. sholde, scholde, AS. scal, sceal, I am obliged, imp. scolde, sceolde, inf. sculan; akin to OS. skulan, pres. skal, imp. skolda, D. zullen,]
- strife n.
- The act of striving; earnest endeavor. [OF. estrif. See Strive.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Life is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Golden Threshold, with an introduction by Arthur Symons (Hyderabad, 1905; London, John Lane, 1905), Project Gutenberg ebook #680; 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, Life, in The Golden Threshold (1905), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #680, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/naidu-golden-threshold/life.html, id L27497.
Form and metre
Life is 14 lines in 3 verse paragraphs. It is in rhyming couplets, 86% of the lines: heroic couplets. The metre is iambic pentameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 82%).
See other poems in heroic couplets, 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 AABB- seemsA · dreamsA · leapB · deepB · amethyst
- 2 -AABB exist · moveA · loveA · thingsB · sufferingsB
- 3 AABB fearsA · yearsA · strifeB · lifeB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Children, ye have not lived, to you it seems | 10 | /˘········ |
| Life is a lovely stalactite of dreams, | 10 | ···/˘˘/˘·· |
| Or carnival of careless joys that leap | 10 | ·/˘˘·/˘··· |
| About your hearts like billows on the deep | 10 | ·····/˘··· |
| In flames of amber and of amethyst. | 10 | ···/˘··/˘˘ |
| Children, ye have not lived, ye but exist | 10 | /˘······˘/ |
| Till some resistless hour shall rise and move | 10 | ··˘/˘/···· |
| Your hearts to wake and hunger after love, | 10 | ·····/˘··· |
| And thirst with passionate longing for the things | 10 | ···/˘/˘··· |
| That burn your brows with blood-red sufferings. | 10 | ·······/˘˘ |
| Till ye have battled with great grief and fears, | 10 | ···/˘····· |
| And borne the conflict of dream-shattering years, | 10 | ···/˘··/˘· |
| Wounded with fierce desire and worn with strife, | 10 | /˘··˘/···· |
| Children, ye have not lived: for this is life. | 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.