Departure from Life
Two are the roads that before thee lie open from life to conduct thee;To the ideal one leads thee, the other to death.See that while yet thou art free, on the first thou commencest thy journey,Ere by the merciless fates on to the other thou'rt led!
About this text
Departure from Life is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Poems of Schiller — Third period, Project Gutenberg ebook #6796; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Friedrich Schiller, Departure from Life, in The Poems of Schiller: Third Period (1805), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #6796, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/schiller-third-period/departure-from-life.html, id L21918.
Form and metre
Departure from Life 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.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Two are the roads that before thee lie open from life to conduct thee; | 17 | ·········/˘···˘/· |
| To the ideal one leads thee, the other to death. | 12 | ··˘/····/˘·· |
| See that while yet thou art free, on the first thou commencest thy journey, | 17 | ···········˘/˘·/˘ |
| Ere by the merciless fates on to the other thou'rt led! | 13 | ···/˘····/˘·· |
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.