The Present
Ring and staff, oh to me on a Rhenish flask ye are welcome!Him a true shepherd I call, who thus gives drink to his sheep.Draught thrice blest! It is by the Muse I have won thee,--the Muse, too,Sends thee,--and even the church places upon thee her seal.
Words in this poem
- rhenish a.
- Of or pertaining to the river Rhine; as, Rhenish wine. [L. Rhenus the Rhine.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
The Present 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 Present, in The Poems of Schiller: Third Period (1805), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #6796, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/schiller-third-period/the-present.html, id L21917.
Form and metre
The Present 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Ring and staff, oh to me on a Rhenish flask ye are welcome! | 15 | ········/˘···/˘ |
| Him a true shepherd I call, who thus gives drink to his sheep. | 14 | ···/˘········· |
| Draught thrice blest! It is by the Muse I have won thee,--the Muse, too, | 15 | ··············· |
| Sends thee,--and even the church places upon thee her seal. | 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.