The Brothers: Act the Fourth: Scene X
Jove, what a life! what manners! what distraction!A bride just coming home without a portion;A Music-Girl already there in keeping:A house of waste; the youth a libertine;Th' old man a dotard!--'Tis not in the pow'rOf Providence herself, howe'er desirous,To save from ruin such a family.
Words in this poem
- jove n.
- The chief divinity of the ancient Romans; Jupiter. [L. Jupiter, gen. Jovis, OL. Jovis, nom. & gen. for Djovis; akin to E. Tuesday. See Tuesday, and cf. Jupiter.]
- distraction n.
- The act of distracting; a drawing apart; separation. [L. distractio: cf. F. distraction.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
The Brothers: Act the Fourth: Scene X is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Comedies of Terence, Project Gutenberg ebook #22695; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Terence, The Brothers: Act the Fourth: Scene X, in The Comedies of Terence (1765), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #22695, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/terence-comedies/the-brothers-act-the-fourth-scene-x.html, id L25844.
Form and metre
The Brothers: Act the Fourth: Scene X is 7 lines in a single stanza. The metre is iambic pentameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 93%).
See other poems in iambic pentameter.
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--- distractionA · portionA · keeping · libertineA · pow'r · desirous · family
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 pentameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Jove, what a life! what manners! what distraction! | 11 | ·····/˘·˘/˘ |
| A bride just coming home without a portion; | 11 | ···/˘····/˘ |
| A Music-Girl already there in keeping: | 11 | ·/˘·˘/˘··/˘ |
| A house of waste; the youth a libertine; | 10 | ·······/˘· |
| Th' old man a dotard!--'Tis not in the pow'r | 10 | ···/˘····· |
| Of Providence herself, howe'er desirous, | 11 | ·/˘˘˘/··˘/˘ |
| To save from ruin such a family. | 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.