Interior
I and myself swore enmity. Alack,Myself has tied my hands behind my back.Yielding, I know there's no excuse in them--I was accomplice to the stratagem.
Words in this poem
- alack interj.
- An exclamation expressive of sorrow. [Prob. from ah! lack! OE. lak loss, failure, misfortune. See Lack.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Interior 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, Interior, in Poems: First Series (1918), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #37860, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/squire-poems/interior.html, id L23181.
Form and metre
Interior is 4 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets: octosyllabic couplets. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic tetrameter.
See other poems in octosyllabic couplets, 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 AABB alackA · backA · themB · stratagemB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| I and myself swore enmity. Alack, | 9 | ···/·/˘˘/ |
| Myself has tied my hands behind my back. | 10 | ·/········ |
| Yielding, I know there's no excuse in them-- | 10 | /˘····˘/·· |
| I was accomplice to the stratagem. | 9 | ··˘/˘··/˘ |
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.