To Proselytizers
"Give me only a fragment of earth beyond the earth's limits,"--So the godlike man said,--"and I will move it with ease."Only give me permission to leave myself for one moment,And without any delay I will engage to be yours.
About this text
To Proselytizers 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, To Proselytizers, in The Poems of Schiller: Third Period (1805), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #6796, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/schiller-third-period/to-proselytizers.html, id L21859.
Form and metre
To Proselytizers 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 |
|---|---|---|
| "Give me only a fragment of earth beyond the earth's limits,"-- | 15 | ··/˘·/˘······/˘ |
| So the godlike man said,--"and I will move it with ease." | 13 | ··/˘········· |
| Only give me permission to leave myself for one moment, | 15 | /˘··˘/˘···/··/˘ |
| And without any delay I will engage to be yours. | 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.