With Hale Affection and Abiding Faith, These Rhymes and Pictures, Are Inscribed, to the Children Everywhere
He owns the bird-songs of the hills--The laughter of the April rills;And his are all the diamonds setIn Morning's dewy coronet,--And his the Dusk's first minted starsThat twinkle through the pasture-barsAnd litter all the skies at nightWith glittering scraps of silver light;--The rainbow's bar, from rim to rim,In beaten gold, belongs to him.
Words in this poem
- twinkle v. i.
- To open and shut the eye rapidly; to blink; to wink. [OE. twinklen, AS. twinclian; akin to OE. twinken to blink, wink, G. zwinken, zwinkern, and perhaps to E. twitch.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
With Hale Affection and Abiding Faith, These Rhymes and Pictures, Are Inscribed, to the Children Everywhere is in the public domain. This text is taken from Riley Child-Rhymes, Project Gutenberg ebook #9777; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: James Whitcomb Riley, With Hale Affection and Abiding Faith, These Rhymes and Pictures, Are Inscribed, to the Children Everywhere, in Riley Child-Rhymes (1890), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #9777, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/riley-child-rhymes/with-hale-affection-and-abiding-faith-these-rhymes-and-pictu.html, id L25032.
Form and metre
With Hale Affection and Abiding Faith, These Rhymes and Pictures, Are Inscribed, to the Children Everywhere is 10 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets: octosyllabic couplets. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 92%).
See other poems in octosyllabic couplets, 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 AABBCCDDEE hillsA · rillsA · setB · coronetB · starsC · barsC · nightD · lightD · rimE · himE
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 |
|---|---|---|
| He owns the bird-songs of the hills-- | 8 | ········ |
| The laughter of the April rills; | 8 | ·/˘··/˘· |
| And his are all the diamonds set | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| In Morning's dewy coronet,-- | 8 | ·/˘/˘/˘/ |
| And his the Dusk's first minted stars | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| That twinkle through the pasture-bars | 8 | ·/˘··/˘· |
| And litter all the skies at night | 8 | ·/˘····· |
| With glittering scraps of silver light;-- | 8 | ·/˘··/˘· |
| The rainbow's bar, from rim to rim, | 8 | ·/······ |
| In beaten gold, belongs to him. | 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.