Peace

Henry John Newbolt (1862–1938) · 1912

iambic tetrameter · ABAB · 4 lines · from Poems: New and Old

No more to watch by Night's eternal shore,With England's chivalry at dawn to ride;No more defeat, faith, victory--O! no moreA cause on earth for which we might have died.

Words in this poem

defeat v. t.
To undo; to disfigure; to destroy. [From F. défait, OF. desfait, p. p. ofe défaire, OF. desfaire, to undo; L. dis- + facere to do. See Feat, Fact, and cf. Disfashion.]

Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.

About this text

Peace is in the public domain. This text is taken from Poems: New and Old, Project Gutenberg ebook #24405; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.

Cite as: Henry John Newbolt, Peace, in Poems: New and Old (1912), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #24405, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/newbolt-poems/peace.html, id L11423.

Form and metre

Peace is 4 lines in a single stanza. It rhymes ABAB. The lines average 10.0 syllables.

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. 1 ABAB shoreA · rideB · moreA · diedB
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. How this is done.

LineSyl.Stress
No more to watch by Night's eternal shore,10······˘/˘·
With England's chivalry at dawn to ride;10·/˘/˘˘····
No more defeat, faith, victory--O! no more10··˘/·/˘···
A cause on earth for which we might have died.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.

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