A Fresh Morning

John Collings Squire (1884–1958) · 1918

iambic tetrameter · 4 lines · from Poems: First Series

Now am I a tin whistleThrough which God blows,And I wish to God I were a trumpet--But why, God only knows.

About this text

A Fresh Morning is in the public domain. This text is taken from Poems - First Series, Project Gutenberg ebook #37860; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.

Cite as: John Collings Squire, A Fresh Morning, in Poems: First Series (1918), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #37860, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/squire-poems/a-fresh-morning.html, id L23180.

Form and metre

A Fresh Morning is 4 lines in a single stanza. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic tetrameter.

See other poems in iambic 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 -A-A whistle · blowsA · trumpet · knowsA
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 tetrameter. How this is done.

LineSyl.Stress
Now am I a tin whistle7·····/˘
Through which God blows,4····
And I wish to God I were a trumpet10········/˘
--But why, God only knows.6···/˘·

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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