Fragment 52, tr. J. H. Merivale
The silver moon is set;The Pleiades are gone;Half the long night is spent, and yetI lie alone.
Words in this poem
- pleiades n.
- The seven daughters of Atlas and the nymph Pleione, fabled to have been made by Jupiter a constellation in the sky.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Fragment 52, tr. J. H. Merivale 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 52, tr. J. H. Merivale, in Sappho: Selected Renderings (1908), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #57390, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sappho-wharton/fr-52.html, id L29183.
Form and metre
Fragment 52, tr. J. H. Merivale 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- setA · gone · yetA · alone
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 |
|---|---|---|
| The silver moon is set; | 6 | ·/˘··· |
| The Pleiades are gone; | 6 | ·/˘··· |
| Half the long night is spent, and yet | 8 | ········ |
| I lie alone. | 4 | ··˘/ |
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.