Pain
Waves are the sea's white daughters,And raindrops the children of rain,But why for my shimmering bodyHave I a mother like Pain?
Night is the mother of stars,And wind the mother of foam--The world is brimming with beauty,But I must stay at home.
Words in this poem
- shimmering n.
- A gleam or glimmering.
- brimming a.
- Full to the brim; overflowing.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Pain 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, Pain, in Flame and Shadow (1920), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #591, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/teasdale-flame-shadow/pain.html, id L16979.
Form and metre
Pain is 8 lines in 2 stanzas of 4 lines each. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic tetrameter. 85% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 7.4 syllables. 3 lines end on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending. 12% of the lines run on without a stop at the line end.
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 daughters · rainA · body · painA
- 2 -A-A stars · foamA · beauty · homeA
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Waves are the sea's white daughters, | 7 | ·····/˘ |
| And raindrops the children of rain, | 8 | ·/··/˘·· |
| But why for my shimmering body | 9 | ····/˘˘/˘ |
| Have I a mother like Pain? | 7 | ···/˘·· |
| Night is the mother of stars, | 7 | ···/˘·· |
| And wind the mother of foam-- | 7 | ···/˘·· |
| The world is brimming with beauty, | 8 | ···/˘·/˘ |
| But I must stay at home. | 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.