Fuel
What of the silence of the keysAnd silvery hands? The iron sings...Though bows lie broken on the strings,The fly-wheels turn eternally...
Bring fuel--drive the fires high...Throw all this artist-lumber inAnd foolish dreams of making things...(Ten million men are called to die.)
As for the common men apart,Who sweat to keep their common breath,And have no hour for books or art--What dreams have these to hide from death!
Words in this poem
- eternally adv.
- In an eternal manner.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Fuel is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Ghetto, and Other Poems, Project Gutenberg ebook #4332; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Lola Ridge, Fuel, in The Ghetto, and Other Poems (1918), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #4332, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/ridge-ghetto/fuel.html, id L20890.
Form and metre
Fuel is 12 lines in 3 stanzas of 4 lines each. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 89%).
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 -AA- keys · singsA · stringsA · eternally
- 2 A--A highA · in · things · dieA
- 3 ABAB apartA · breathB · artA · deathB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| What of the silence of the keys | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| And silvery hands? The iron sings... | 8 | ·/˘˘··/· |
| Though bows lie broken on the strings, | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| The fly-wheels turn eternally... | 8 | ····˘/˘˘ |
| Bring fuel--drive the fires high... | 8 | ·/˘··/˘· |
| Throw all this artist-lumber in | 8 | ···/˘/˘· |
| And foolish dreams of making things... | 8 | ·/˘··/˘· |
| (Ten million men are called to die.) | 8 | ·/˘····· |
| As for the common men apart, | 8 | ···/˘·˘/ |
| Who sweat to keep their common breath, | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| And have no hour for books or art-- | 8 | ···/···· |
| What dreams have these to hide from death! | 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.