Interior
Her mind lives in a quiet room,A narrow room, and tall,With pretty lamps to quench the gloomAnd mottoes on the wall.
There all the things are waxen neatAnd set in decorous lines;And there are posies, round and sweet,And little, straightened vines.
Her mind lives tidily, apartFrom cold and noise and pain,And bolts the door against her heart,Out wailing in the rain.
Words in this poem
- tidily adv.
- In a tidy manner.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Interior is in the public domain. This text is taken from Sunset Gun: Poems (Boni & Liveright, 1928), English 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: Dorothy Parker, Interior, in Sunset Gun (1928), text of English Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/parker-sunset-gun/interior.html, id L27414.
Form and metre
Interior is 12 lines in 3 stanzas of 4 lines each. Every stanza rhymes ABAB. The metre is common measure, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 92%).
See other poems in common measure.
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 ABAB roomA · tallB · gloomA · wallB
- 2 ABAB neatA · linesB · sweetA · vinesB
- 3 ABAB apartA · painB · heartA · rainB
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 common measure. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Her mind lives in a quiet room, | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| A narrow room, and tall, | 6 | ·/˘··· |
| With pretty lamps to quench the gloom | 8 | ·/˘····· |
| And mottoes on the wall. | 6 | ·/˘··· |
| There all the things are waxen neat | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| And set in decorous lines; | 7 | ···/˘˘· |
| And there are posies, round and sweet, | 7 | ······· |
| And little, straightened vines. | 6 | ·/˘/˘· |
| Her mind lives tidily, apart | 8 | ···/˘˘˘/ |
| From cold and noise and pain, | 6 | ······ |
| And bolts the door against her heart, | 8 | ········ |
| Out wailing in the rain. | 6 | ·/˘··· |
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.