The Playing Infant
Play on thy mother's bosom, babe, for in that holy isleThe error cannot find thee yet, the grieving, nor the guile;Held in thy mother's arms above life's dark and troubled wave,Thou lookest with thy fearless smile upon the floating grave.Play, loveliest innocence!--Thee yet Arcadia circles round,A charmed power for thee has set the lists of fairy ground;Each gleesome impulse Nature now can sanction and befriend,Nor to that willing heart as yet the duty and the end.Play, for the haggard labor soon will come to seize its prey.Alas! when duty grows thy law, enjoyment fades away!
Words in this poem
- babe n.
- An infant; a young child of either sex; a baby. [Cf. Ir. bab, baban, W. baban, maban.]
- isle v. t.
- To cause to become an island, or like an island; to surround or encompass; to island.
- arcadia n.
- A mountainous and picturesque district of Greece, in the heart of the Peloponnesus, whose people were distinguished for contentment and rural happiness.
- gleesome a.
- Merry; joyous; gleeful.
- befriend v. t.
- To act as a friend to; to favor; to aid, benefit, or countenance.
- haggard a.
- Wild or intractable; disposed to break away from duty; untamed; as, a haggard or refractory hawk. Shak [F. hagard; of German origin, and prop. meaning, of the hegde or woods, wild, untamed. See Hedge, 1st Haw, and -ard.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
The Playing Infant 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 Playing Infant, in The Poems of Schiller: Third Period (1805), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #6796, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/schiller-third-period/the-playing-infant.html, id L21838.
Form and metre
The Playing Infant is 10 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets. The metre is iambic heptameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 90%).
See other poems in rhyming couplets, other poems in iambic heptameter.
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 isleA · guileA · waveB · graveB · roundC · groundC · befriendD · endD · preyE · awayE
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 heptameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Play on thy mother's bosom, babe, for in that holy isle | 14 | ···/˘/˘····/˘· |
| The error cannot find thee yet, the grieving, nor the guile; | 14 | ·/˘/˘····/˘··· |
| Held in thy mother's arms above life's dark and troubled wave, | 14 | ···/˘······/˘· |
| Thou lookest with thy fearless smile upon the floating grave. | 14 | ·/˘··/˘····/˘· |
| Play, loveliest innocence!--Thee yet Arcadia circles round, | 14 | ····/˘··˘/˘/˘· |
| A charmed power for thee has set the lists of fairy ground; | 14 | ··/˘·······/˘· |
| Each gleesome impulse Nature now can sanction and befriend, | 14 | ·/˘/˘/˘··/˘·˘/ |
| Nor to that willing heart as yet the duty and the end. | 14 | ···/˘····/˘··· |
| Play, for the haggard labor soon will come to seize its prey. | 14 | ···/˘/˘······· |
| Alas! when duty grows thy law, enjoyment fades away! | 14 | ˘/·/˘···˘/˘·˘/ |
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.