The Sunday Children
Years has the master been laboring, but always without satisfaction;To an ingenious race 'twould be in vision conferred.What they yesterday learned, to-day they fain would be teaching:Small compassion, alas, is by those gentlemen shown!
Words in this poem
- laboring a.
- That labors; performing labor; esp., performing coarse, heavy work, not requiring skill also, set apart for labor; as, laboring days.
- fain v. t.
- To be glad ; to wish or desire.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
The Sunday Children 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 Sunday Children, in The Poems of Schiller: Third Period (1805), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #6796, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/schiller-third-period/the-sunday-children.html, id L21921.
Form and metre
The Sunday Children is 4 lines in a single stanza.
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 satisfactionA · conferred · teaching · shownA
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. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Years has the master been laboring, but always without satisfaction; | 17 | ···/˘·/˘·/˘···˘/˘ |
| To an ingenious race 'twould be in vision conferred. | 13 | ··˘/˘····/˘˘/ |
| What they yesterday learned, to-day they fain would be teaching: | 14 | ··/˘········/˘ |
| Small compassion, alas, is by those gentlemen shown! | 12 | ·˘/˘˘/···/˘· |
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.