For Music
Death in the cold grey morningCame to the man where he lay;And the wind shivered, and the tree shudderedAnd the dawn was grey.
And the face of the man was grey in the dawn,And the watchers by the bedKnew, as they heard the shaking of the leaves,That the man was dead.
About this text
For Music 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, For Music, in Poems: First Series (1918), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #37860, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/squire-poems/for-music.html, id L23169.
Form and metre
For Music is 8 lines in 2 stanzas of 4 lines each. 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 -A-A morning · layA · shuddered · greyA
- 2 -A-A dawn · bedA · leaves · deadA
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.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Death in the cold grey morning | 7 | ·····/˘ |
| Came to the man where he lay; | 7 | ······· |
| And the wind shivered, and the tree shuddered | 10 | ···/˘···/˘ |
| And the dawn was grey. | 5 | ····· |
| And the face of the man was grey in the dawn, | 11 | ··········· |
| And the watchers by the bed | 7 | ··/˘··· |
| Knew, as they heard the shaking of the leaves, | 10 | ·····/˘··· |
| That the man was dead. | 5 | ····· |
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.