Spires
Spires of Grace Church,For you the workers of the worldTravailed with the mountains...Aborting their own dreamsTill the dream of you arose--Beautiful, swaddled in stone--Scorning their hands.
About this text
Spires 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, Spires, in The Ghetto, and Other Poems (1918), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #4332, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/ridge-ghetto/spires.html, id L20888.
Form and metre
Spires is 7 lines in a single stanza. The metre is iambic trimeter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 85%).
See other poems in iambic trimeter.
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.
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 trimeter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Spires of Grace Church, | 4 | ···· |
| For you the workers of the world | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| Travailed with the mountains... | 6 | ˘/··/˘ |
| Aborting their own dreams | 6 | ˘/˘··· |
| Till the dream of you arose-- | 7 | ·····˘/ |
| Beautiful, swaddled in stone-- | 6 | /˘˘··· |
| Scorning their hands. | 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.