A Fragment: To Music
Silver key of the fountain of tears,Where the spirit drinks till the brain is wild;Softest grave of a thousand fears,Where their mother, Care, like a drowsy child,Is laid asleep in flowers.
About this text
A Fragment: To Music is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley — Volume 2, Project Gutenberg ebook #4798; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Fragment: To Music, in Ode to the West Wind, and Other Poems (1816–1819), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #4798, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/shelley-later-poems/a-fragment-to-music.html, id L16313.
Form and metre
A Fragment: To Music is 5 lines in a single stanza. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic pentameter. 70% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 8.8 syllables. 1 line ends on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending.
See other poems in iambic pentameter.
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 ABAB- tearsA · wildB · fearsA · childB · flowers
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 pentameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Silver key of the fountain of tears, | 9 | /˘···/˘·· |
| Where the spirit drinks till the brain is wild; | 10 | ··/˘······ |
| Softest grave of a thousand fears, | 8 | /˘···/˘· |
| Where their mother, Care, like a drowsy child, | 10 | ··/˘···/˘· |
| Is laid asleep in flowers. | 7 | ··˘/·/˘ |
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.