A Poem of Privacy
When a young man, passion-laden,In a chamber meets a maiden,Then felicitous communion,By love's strain between the twain,Grows from forth their union;For the game, it hath no name,Of lips, arms, and hidden charms.
Words in this poem
- felicitous a.
- Characterized by felicity; happy; prosperous; delightful; skilful; successful; happily applied or expressed; appropriate.
- twain a.
- Two;- nearly obsolete in common discourse, but used in poetry and burlesque. [OE. twein, tweien, tweyne, AS. twegen, masc. See Two.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
A Poem of Privacy is in the public domain. This text is taken from Wine, Women, and Song Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse, Project Gutenberg ebook #18044; 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 Addington Symonds, A Poem of Privacy, in Wine, Women and Song (1884), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #18044, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/symonds-wine-women/a-poem-of-privacy.html, id L11841.
Form and metre
A Poem of Privacy is 7 lines in a single stanza. The metre is trochaic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 88%). 98% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 7.3 syllables. 4 lines end on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending.
See other poems in trochaic 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 AABAB-- ladenA · maidenA · communionB · twainA · unionB · name · charms
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 trochaic tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| When a young man, passion-laden, | 8 | ····/˘/˘ |
| In a chamber meets a maiden, | 8 | ··/˘··/˘ |
| Then felicitous communion, | 8 | ·˘/˘˘˘/˘ |
| By love's strain between the twain, | 7 | ······· |
| Grows from forth their union; | 6 | ····/˘ |
| For the game, it hath no name, | 7 | ······· |
| Of lips, arms, and hidden charms. | 7 | ····/˘· |
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.