Fragment: 'I Faint, I Perish with My Love!'
I faint, I perish with my love! I growFrail as a cloud whose [splendours] paleUnder the evening's ever-changing glow:I die like mist upon the gale,And like a wave under the calm I fail.
About this text
Fragment: 'I Faint, I Perish with My Love!' 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: 'I Faint, I Perish with My Love!', in The Complete Poetical Works, Volume II (1816–1819), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #4798, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/shelley-later-poems/fragment-i-faint-i-perish-with-my-love.html, id L16466.
Form and metre
Fragment: 'I Faint, I Perish with My Love!' is 5 lines in a single stanza. It rhymes ABABB. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic pentameter. 100% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 9.2 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 ABABB growA · paleB · glowA · galeB · failB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| I faint, I perish with my love! I grow | 10 | ···/˘····· |
| Frail as a cloud whose [splendours] pale | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| Under the evening's ever-changing glow: | 10 | ···/˘/˘/˘· |
| I die like mist upon the gale, | 8 | ········ |
| And like a wave under the calm I fail. | 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.