True Kindness
True kindness is a pure divine affinity,Not founded upon human consanguinity.It is a spirit, not a blood relation,Superior to family and station.
About this text
True Kindness is in the public domain. This text is taken from Poems of Nature, Project Gutenberg ebook #59988; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Henry David Thoreau, True Kindness, in Poems of Nature (1895), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #59988, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/thoreau-poems/true-kindness.html, id L02801.
Form and metre
True Kindness is 4 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets. The lines average 10.5 syllables. 3 lines end on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending.
See other poems in rhyming couplets.
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 affinityA · consanguinityA · relationB · stationB
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. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| True kindness is a pure divine affinity, | 11 | ·/˘···˘/˘/˘ |
| Not founded upon human consanguinity. | 12 | ·/˘··/˘····· |
| It is a spirit, not a blood relation, | 10 | ···/···˘/˘ |
| Superior to family and station. | 9 | ˘/˘·/˘·/˘ |
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.