Paraphrase
We shriek to live, but no man ever livesTill he has rid the ghost of human breath;We dream to die, but no man ever diesTill he has quit the road that runs to death.
Words in this poem
- ghost n.
- The spirit; the soul of man. [OE. gast, gost, soul, spirit, AS. gast breath, spirit, soul; akin to OS. g spirit, soul, D. geest, G. geist, and prob. to E. gaze, ghastly.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Paraphrase is in the public domain. This text is taken from Children of the Night, Project Gutenberg ebook #313; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Edwin Arlington Robinson, Paraphrase, in The Children of the Night (1897), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #313, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/robinson-children-of-night/paraphrase.html, id L08024.
Form and metre
Paraphrase is 4 lines in a single stanza. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic pentameter. 100% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 10.0 syllables.
See other poems in iambic pentameter.
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 lives · breathA · dies · deathA
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 pentameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| We shriek to live, but no man ever lives | 10 | ·······/˘· |
| Till he has rid the ghost of human breath; | 10 | ·······/˘· |
| We dream to die, but no man ever dies | 10 | ·······/˘· |
| Till he has quit the road that runs to death. | 10 | ·········· |
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.