The Other
This Voice you hear, this call you fear, is it unprophesied or new?Were you so insolent to think its rope would never circle you?Did you then beastlike live and walk with ears and eyes thatwould not turn?Who bade you hope your service 'scape in that eternal retinue?
Words in this poem
- bade
- A form of the pat tense of Bid.
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.html, id L23161.
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 newA · youA · that · turn · retinueA
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 |
|---|---|---|
| This Voice you hear, this call you fear, is it unprophesied or new? | 15 | ··············· |
| Were you so insolent to think its rope would never circle you? | 14 | ···/˘·····//˘· |
| Did you then beastlike live and walk with ears and eyes that | 13 | ···/˘········ |
| would not turn? | 3 | ··· |
| Who bade you hope your service 'scape in that eternal retinue? | 16 | ·····/˘···˘/˘/˘· |
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.