Fragment 120, tr. Sir Charles A. Elton
This oar and net and fisher's wickered snareMeniscus placed above his buried son—Memorials of the lot in life he bare,The hard and needy life of Pelagon.
Words in this poem
- wickered a.
- Made of, secured by, or covered with, wickers or wickerwork.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Fragment 120, tr. Sir Charles A. Elton is in the public domain. This text is taken from Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation (ed. Henry Thornton Wharton, John Lane, 1908, fifth edition), Project Gutenberg ebook #57390, the Various (ed. H. T. Wharton) 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: Sappho, Fragment 120, tr. Sir Charles A. Elton, in Sappho: Selected Renderings (1908), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #57390, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sappho-wharton/fr-120.html, id L29205.
Form and metre
Fragment 120, tr. Sir Charles A. Elton 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 tetrameter.
See 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 A-A- snareA · son · bareA · pelagon
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 |
|---|---|---|
| This oar and net and fisher's wickered snare | 10 | ·····/˘/˘· |
| Meniscus placed above his buried son— | 10 | ˘/˘····/˘· |
| Memorials of the lot in life he bare, | 10 | ˘/˘······· |
| The hard and needy life of Pelagon. | 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.