"My Heart Is Heavy"
My heart is heavy with many a songLike ripe fruit bearing down the tree,But I can never give you one--My songs do not belong to me.
Yet in the evening, in the duskWhen moths go to and fro,In the gray hour if the fruit has fallen,Take it, no one will know.
About this text
"My Heart Is Heavy" is in the public domain. This text is taken from Flame and Shadow, Project Gutenberg ebook #591; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Sara Teasdale, "My Heart Is Heavy", in Flame and Shadow (1920), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #591, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/teasdale-flame-shadow/my-heart-is-heavy.html, id L20799.
Form and metre
"My Heart Is Heavy" is 8 lines in 2 stanzas of 4 lines each. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 86%).
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 -A-A song · treeA · one · meA
- 2 -A-A dusk · froA · fallen · knowA
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 |
|---|---|---|
| My heart is heavy with many a song | 9 | ···/˘·/·· |
| Like ripe fruit bearing down the tree, | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| But I can never give you one-- | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| My songs do not belong to me. | 8 | ····˘/·· |
| Yet in the evening, in the dusk | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| When moths go to and fro, | 6 | ······ |
| In the gray hour if the fruit has fallen, | 10 | ···/····/˘ |
| Take it, no one will know. | 6 | ······ |
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.