Fragment: 'Follow to the Deep Wood's Weeds'

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) · 1816–1819

trochaic tetrameter · rhyming couplets · 7 lines · from The Complete Poetical Works, Volume II

Follow to the deep wood's weeds,Follow to the wild-briar dingle,Where we seek to intermingle,And the violet tells her taleTo the odour-scented gale,For they two have enough to doOf such work as I and you.

Words in this poem

dingle n.
A narrow dale; a small dell; a small, secluded, and embowered valley. [Of uncertain origin: cf. AS. ding prison; or perh. akin to dimble.]
intermingle v. t.
To mingle or mix together; to intermix. Hooker.
odour n.
Any smell, whether fragrant or offensive; scent; perfume. [OE. odor, odour, OF. odor, odour, F. odeur, fr. L. odor; akin to olere to smell, Gr. Olfactory, Osmium, Ozone, Redolent.]

Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.

About this text

Fragment: 'Follow to the Deep Wood's Weeds' 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: 'Follow to the Deep Wood's Weeds', in The Complete Poetical Works, Volume II (1816–1819), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #4798, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/shelley-later-poems/fragment-follow-to-the-deep-wood-s-weeds.html, id L16365.

Form and metre

Fragment: 'Follow to the Deep Wood's Weeds' is 7 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets, 86% of the lines. The metre is trochaic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 83%). 91% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 7.7 syllables. 2 lines end on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending.

See other poems in rhyming couplets, other poems in trochaic 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.

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. 1 -AABBCC weeds · dingleA · intermingleA · taleB · galeB · doC · youC
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 trochaic tetrameter. How this is done.

LineSyl.Stress
Follow to the deep wood's weeds,7/˘·····
Follow to the wild-briar dingle,9/˘···/˘/˘
Where we seek to intermingle,8·····˘/˘
And the violet tells her tale8··/˘˘···
To the odour-scented gale,7··/˘/˘·
For they two have enough to do8····˘/··
Of such work as I and you.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.

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