Rhyme Against Living
If wild my breast and sore my pride,I bask in dreams of suicide;If cool my heart and high my head,I think, “How lucky are the dead!”
Words in this poem
- bask v. i.
- To lie in warmth; to be exposed to genial heat. [OScand. ba to bathe one's self, or perh. bakask to bake one's self, sk being reflexive. See Bath, n., Bake, v. t.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Rhyme Against Living 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, Rhyme Against Living, in Sunset Gun (1928), text of English Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/parker-sunset-gun/rhyme-against-living.html, id L27472.
Form and metre
Rhyme Against Living is 4 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets.
See other poems in rhyming couplets.
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 prideA · suicideA · headB · deadB
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.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| If wild my breast and sore my pride, | 8 | ········ |
| I bask in dreams of suicide; | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| If cool my heart and high my head, | 8 | ········ |
| I think, “How lucky are the dead!” | 8 | ···/˘··· |
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.