Fragment: To Italy
As the sunrise to the night,As the north wind to the clouds,As the earthquake's fiery flight,Ruining mountain solitudes,Everlasting Italy,Be those hopes and fears on thee.
About this text
Fragment: To Italy 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: To Italy, in The Complete Poetical Works, Volume II (1816–1819), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #4798, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/shelley-later-poems/fragment-to-italy.html, id L16380.
Form and metre
Fragment: To Italy is 6 lines in a single stanza. The metre is trochaic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 83%). 88% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 7.3 syllables. 1 line ends on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending.
See 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 A-A--- nightA · clouds · flightA · solitudes · italy · thee
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.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| As the sunrise to the night, | 7 | ··/···· |
| As the north wind to the clouds, | 7 | ······· |
| As the earthquake's fiery flight, | 8 | ··/·/˘˘· |
| Ruining mountain solitudes, | 8 | /˘˘/˘/˘· |
| Everlasting Italy, | 7 | ·˘/˘/˘˘ |
| Be those hopes and fears on thee. | 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.