Verses in the Night (After an Evening Spent in Reading the Big Boys): Triolet
Her teeth were accidental starsWith a talent for squad drill;The Pleiades, Orion, Mars—Her teeth were accidental stars,Assured celestial corporal’s bars,So straight they stood, and still.Her teeth were accidental starsWith a talent for squad drill.
Words in this poem
- squad n.
- A small party of men assembled for drill, inspection, or other purposes. [F. escouade, fr. Sp. escuadra, or It. squadra, (assumed) LL. exquadrare to square; L. ex + quadra a square. See Square.]
- pleiades n.
- The seven daughters of Atlas and the nymph Pleione, fabled to have been made by Jupiter a constellation in the sky.
- orion n.
- A large and bright constellation on the equator, between the stars Aldebaran and Sirius. It contains a remarkable nebula visible to the naked eye.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Verses in the Night (After an Evening Spent in Reading the Big Boys): Triolet 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, Verses in the Night (After an Evening Spent in Reading the Big Boys): Triolet, in Sunset Gun (1928), text of English Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/parker-sunset-gun/verses-in-the-night-triolet.html, id L27458.
Form and metre
Verses in the Night (After an Evening Spent in Reading the Big Boys): Triolet is 8 lines in a single stanza. It rhymes ABAAABAB. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 91%).
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 ABAAABAB starsA · drillB · marsA · starsA · barsA · stillB · starsA · drillB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Her teeth were accidental stars | 8 | ····˘/˘· |
| With a talent for squad drill; | 7 | ··/˘··· |
| The Pleiades, Orion, Mars— | 8 | ·/˘·˘/˘· |
| Her teeth were accidental stars, | 8 | ····˘/˘· |
| Assured celestial corporal’s bars, | 8 | ˘/˘/˘/˘· |
| So straight they stood, and still. | 6 | ······ |
| Her teeth were accidental stars | 8 | ····˘/˘· |
| With a talent for squad drill. | 7 | ··/˘··· |
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.