Chapter V: Story of the Physician and the Peasant
A peasant one night could not sleep from an acheIn his side. A physician who practised there spake :"From his habit of eating vine leaves this ache springs ;"Twill be strange, if the night to a finish he brings !For a Tartar's hard arrow-head, stuck in the chest,Is better than eating what will not digest.In a twist of the gut should a morsel be caught,The whole of the life of the fool comes to naught."It occurred that the doctor expired that same night;Forty years have elapsed and the swain is all right.
Words in this poem
- ache n.
- A name given to several species of plants; as, smallage, wild celery, parsley. Holland. [F. ache, L. apium parsley.]
- twill v. i.
- To weave, as cloth, so as to produce the appearance of diagonal lines or ribs on the surface. [Scotch tweel; probably from LG. twillen to make double, from twi- two; akin to AS. twi-, E. twi- in twilight. See Twice, and cf. Tweed, Tweel.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Chapter V: Story of the Physician and the Peasant is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Garden of Fragrance: being a complete translation of the Bostan of Sadi from the original Persian into English verse, by G. S. Davie (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Co., 1882), Internet Archive, the G. S. Davie 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: Saadi, Chapter V: Story of the Physician and the Peasant, in The Garden of Fragrance (1882), text of Internet Archive, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/saadi-bostan/5-5.html, id L29656.
Form and metre
Chapter V: Story of the Physician and the Peasant is 10 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets. The metre is anapaestic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 95%).
See other poems in rhyming couplets, other poems in anapaestic 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 acheA · spakeA · springsB · bringsB · chestC · digestC · caughtD · naughtD · nightE · rightE
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 anapaestic tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| A peasant one night could not sleep from an ache | 11 | ·/˘········ |
| In his side. A physician who practised there spake : | 12 | ····˘/˘····· |
| "From his habit of eating vine leaves this ache springs ; | 12 | ··/˘·/˘····· |
| "Twill be strange, if the night to a finish he brings ! | 12 | ········/˘·· |
| For a Tartar's hard arrow-head, stuck in the chest, | 12 | ··/˘·/˘····· |
| Is better than eating what will not digest. | 11 | ·/˘·/˘···˘/ |
| In a twist of the gut should a morsel be caught, | 12 | ········/˘·· |
| The whole of the life of the fool comes to naught." | 11 | ··········· |
| It occurred that the doctor expired that same night; | 12 | ·˘/··/˘˘/··· |
| Forty years have elapsed and the swain is all right. | 12 | /˘··˘/······ |
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.