The Fairest Apparition
If thou never hast gazed upon beauty in moments of sorrow,Thou canst with truth never boast that thou true beauty hast seen.If thou never hast gazed upon gladness in beauteous features,Thou canst with truth never boast that thou true gladness hast seen.
Words in this poem
- hast
- , 2d pers. sing. pres. of. Fave, contr. of havest.
- beauteous a.
- Full of beauty; beautiful; very handsome. [Mostly poetic] -- Beau"te*ous*ly, adv. --
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
The Fairest Apparition 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, The Fairest Apparition, in The Poems of Schiller: Third Period (1805), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #6796, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/schiller-third-period/the-fairest-apparition.html, id L21850.
Form and metre
The Fairest Apparition 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 sorrow · seenA · features · seenA
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 |
|---|---|---|
| If thou never hast gazed upon beauty in moments of sorrow, | 15 | ··/····/˘·/˘·/˘ |
| Thou canst with truth never boast that thou true beauty hast seen. | 13 | ····/····/˘·· |
| If thou never hast gazed upon gladness in beauteous features, | 15 | ··/····/˘·/˘˘/˘ |
| Thou canst with truth never boast that thou true gladness hast seen. | 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.