Wisdom and Prudence
Wouldst thou, my friend, mount up to the highest summit of wisdom,Be not deterred by the fear, prudence thy course may derideThat shortsighted one sees but the bank that from thee is flying,Not the one which ere long thou wilt attain with bold flight.
Words in this poem
- deride v. t.
- To laugh at with contempt; to laugh to scorn; to turn to ridicule or make sport of; to mock; to scoff at. [L. deridere, derisum; de- + rid to laugh. See Ridicule.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Wisdom and Prudence 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, Wisdom and Prudence, in The Poems of Schiller: Third Period (1805), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #6796, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/schiller-third-period/wisdom-and-prudence.html, id L21895.
Form and metre
Wisdom and Prudence 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Wouldst thou, my friend, mount up to the highest summit of wisdom, | 15 | ········/˘/˘·/˘ |
| Be not deterred by the fear, prudence thy course may deride | 14 | ··˘/···/˘···˘/ |
| That shortsighted one sees but the bank that from thee is flying, | 15 | ·//˘·········/˘ |
| Not the one which ere long thou wilt attain with bold flight. | 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.