Fragment: A Wanderer
He wanders, like a day-appearing dream,Through the dim wildernesses of the mind;Through desert woods and tracts, which seemLike ocean, homeless, boundless, unconfined.
Words in this poem
- homeless a.
- Destitute of a home. [AS.hamleas.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Fragment: A Wanderer 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, Fragment: A Wanderer, 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/fragment-a-wanderer.html, id L16465.
Form and metre
Fragment: A Wanderer is 4 lines in a single stanza. It rhymes ABAB. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic pentameter. 94% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 9.5 syllables.
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 dreamA · mindB · seemA · unconfinedB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| He wanders, like a day-appearing dream, | 10 | ·/˘···˘/˘· |
| Through the dim wildernesses of the mind; | 10 | ···/˘˘˘··· |
| Through desert woods and tracts, which seem | 8 | ·/˘····· |
| Like ocean, homeless, boundless, unconfined. | 10 | ·/˘/˘/˘·˘/ |
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.