The Other
Ignorance, then, was all your fault and filmed eyes that could not know,That half discerned and never learned the temporal way that men must go;You set the image of the world high for your heart's idolatry,Though with your lips you called the world a toy, a ghost,a passing show.
Words in this poem
- ghost n.
- The spirit; the soul of man. [OE. gast, gost, soul, spirit, AS. gast breath, spirit, soul; akin to OS. g spirit, soul, D. geest, G. geist, and prob. to E. gaze, ghastly.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
The Other 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, The Other, in Poems: First Series (1918), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #37860, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/squire-poems/the-other-2.html, id L23163.
Form and metre
The Other is 5 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 AA--A knowA · goA · idolatry · ghost · showA
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Ignorance, then, was all your fault and filmed eyes that could not know, | 14 | /˘············ |
| That half discerned and never learned the temporal way that men must go; | 15 | ··˘/·/··/˘····· |
| You set the image of the world high for your heart's idolatry, | 15 | ···/˘·······˘/˘ |
| Though with your lips you called the world a toy, a ghost, | 12 | ············ |
| a passing show. | 4 | ·/˘· |
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.