At Night
Dark fir-tops foot the moony sky,Blue moonlight bars the drive;Here at the open window ISit smoking and alive.
Wind in the branches swells and breaksLike ocean on a beach;Deep in the sky and my heart there wakesA thought I cannot reach.
Words in this poem
- moony a.
- Of or pertaining to the moon.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
At Night 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, At Night, in Poems: First Series (1918), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #37860, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/squire-poems/at-night.html, id L23154.
Form and metre
At Night is 8 lines in 2 stanzas of 4 lines each. Every stanza rhymes ABAB. The metre is common measure, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 89%).
See other poems in common measure.
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 skyA · driveB · iA · aliveB
- 2 ABAB breaksA · beachB · wakesA · reachB
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 common measure. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Dark fir-tops foot the moony sky, | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| Blue moonlight bars the drive; | 6 | ·/···· |
| Here at the open window I | 8 | ···/˘/˘· |
| Sit smoking and alive. | 6 | ·/˘·˘/ |
| Wind in the branches swells and breaks | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| Like ocean on a beach; | 6 | ·/˘··· |
| Deep in the sky and my heart there wakes | 9 | ········· |
| A thought I cannot reach. | 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.