Evening
The bleak fields are asleep,My heart alone wakes;The evening in the harbourDown his red sails takes.
Night, guardian of dreams,Now wanders through the land;The moon, a lily white,Blossoms within her hand.
Words in this poem
- harbour n.
- A station for rest and entertainment; a place of security and comfort; a refuge; a shelter. [OE herbor, herberwe, herberge, Icel. herbergi (cf. OHG. heriberga), orig., a shelter for soldiers; herr army + bjarga to save, help, defend; akin to AS. here ar]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Evening is in the public domain. This text is taken from Poems, translated by Jessie Lemont, with an introduction by H.T. (New York: Tobias A. Wright, 1918), Project Gutenberg ebook #38594, the Jessie Lemont translation; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Rainer Maria Rilke, Evening, in Poems (1918), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #38594, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/rilke-poems-lemont/evening.html, id L27722.
Form and metre
Evening is 8 lines in 2 stanzas of 4 lines each. The metre is iambic trimeter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 87%).
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.
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 -A-A asleep · wakesA · harbour · takesA
- 2 -A-A dreams · landA · white · handA
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 |
|---|---|---|
| The bleak fields are asleep, | 6 | ····˘/ |
| My heart alone wakes; | 5 | ··˘/· |
| The evening in the harbour | 7 | ·/˘··/˘ |
| Down his red sails takes. | 5 | ····· |
| Night, guardian of dreams, | 6 | ·/˘˘·· |
| Now wanders through the land; | 6 | ·/˘··· |
| The moon, a lily white, | 6 | ···/˘· |
| Blossoms within her hand. | 6 | /˘···· |
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.