Epigram
My soul, sit thou a patient looker-on;Judge not the play before the play is done:Her plot hath many changes; every daySpeaks a new scene; the last act crowns the play.
About this text
Epigram is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900, Project Gutenberg ebook #66619; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Francis Quarles, Epigram, in Poems (1592–1644), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #66619, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/obev-francis-quarles/epigram.html, id L16059.
Form and metre
Epigram is 4 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets, 50% of the lines: heroic couplets. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic pentameter. 96% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 10.2 syllables.
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 --AA on · done · dayA · playA
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 |
|---|---|---|
| My soul, sit thou a patient looker-on; | 10 | ·····/˘/˘· |
| Judge not the play before the play is done: | 10 | ·········· |
| Her plot hath many changes; every day | 11 | ···/˘/˘/˘˘· |
| Speaks a new scene; the last act crowns the play. | 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.