Wine, Women, and Song I
"Of what is't fools make such vain keeping?Sin their conception, their birth weeping,Their life a general mist of error,Their death a hideous storm of terror."
About this text
Wine, Women, and Song I 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, Wine, Women, and Song I, in Wine, Women and Song (1884), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #18044, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/symonds-wine-women/wine-women-and-song-i.html, id L11802.
Form and metre
Wine, Women, and Song I is 4 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in trochaic tetrameter. 80% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 9.5 syllables. 4 lines end on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending.
See other poems in rhyming couplets, 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 AABB keepingA · weepingA · errorB · terrorB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| "Of what is't fools make such vain keeping? | 9 | ·······/˘ |
| Sin their conception, their birth weeping, | 9 | ··˘/˘··/˘ |
| Their life a general mist of error, | 10 | ···/˘˘··/˘ |
| Their death a hideous storm of terror." | 10 | ···/˘˘··/˘ |
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.