Fragment: The Lady of the South
Faint with love, the Lady of the SouthLay in the paradise of LebanonUnder a heaven of cedar boughs: the drouthOf love was on her lips; the light was goneOut of her eyes--
About this text
Fragment: The Lady of the South 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: The Lady of the South, in The Complete Poetical Works, Volume II (1816–1819), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #4798, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/shelley-later-poems/fragment-the-lady-of-the-south.html, id L16467.
Form and metre
Fragment: The Lady of the South 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. 96% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 8.6 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- southA · lebanonB · drouthA · goneB · eyes
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Faint with love, the Lady of the South | 9 | ····/˘··· |
| Lay in the paradise of Lebanon | 10 | ···/˘··/˘˘ |
| Under a heaven of cedar boughs: the drouth | 10 | ···/·/˘··· |
| Of love was on her lips; the light was gone | 10 | ·········· |
| Out of her eyes-- | 4 | ···· |
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.