The Vine
The wine of Love is music,And the feast of Love is song:And when Love sits down to the banquet,Love sits long:
Sits long and arises drunken,But not with the feast and the wine;He reeleth with his own heart,That great, rich Vine.
About this text
The Vine 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: James Thomson, The Vine, in Poems (1700–1748), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #66619, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/obev-james-thomson/the-vine.html, id L16160.
Form and metre
The Vine is 8 lines in 2 stanzas of 4 lines each. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 79%). 100% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 6.6 syllables. 3 lines end on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending.
See other poems in iambic 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 -A-A music · songA · banquet · longA
- 2 AA-A drunkenA · wineA · heart · vineA
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 tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| The wine of Love is music, | 7 | ·····/˘ |
| And the feast of Love is song: | 7 | ······· |
| And when Love sits down to the banquet, | 9 | ·······/˘ |
| Love sits long: | 3 | ··· |
| Sits long and arises drunken, | 8 | ···˘/˘/˘ |
| But not with the feast and the wine; | 8 | ········ |
| He reeleth with his own heart, | 7 | ·/˘···· |
| That great, rich Vine. | 4 | ···· |
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.