Dorothea
A deeper crimson in the rose,A deeper blue in sky and sea,And ever, as the summer goes,A deeper loss in losing thee!
A deeper music in the strainOf hermit-thrush from lonely tree;And deeper grows the sense of gainMy life has found in having thee.
A deeper love, a deeper rest,A deeper joy in all I see;And ever deeper in my breastA silver song that comes from thee!
About this text
Dorothea is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Poems of Henry Van Dyke, Project Gutenberg ebook #16229; 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 Van Dyke, Dorothea, in The Poems of Henry Van Dyke (1925), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #16229, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/van-dyke-poems/dorothea.html, id L22864.
Form and metre
Dorothea is 12 lines in 3 stanzas of 4 lines each. Every stanza rhymes ABAB. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 98%).
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 ABAB roseA · seaB · goesA · theeB
- 2 ABAB strainA · treeB · gainA · theeB
- 3 ABAB restA · seeB · breastA · theeB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| A deeper crimson in the rose, | 8 | ·/˘/˘··· |
| A deeper blue in sky and sea, | 8 | ·/˘····· |
| And ever, as the summer goes, | 8 | ·/˘··/˘· |
| A deeper loss in losing thee! | 8 | ·/˘··/˘· |
| A deeper music in the strain | 8 | ·/˘/˘··· |
| Of hermit-thrush from lonely tree; | 8 | ·/˘··/˘· |
| And deeper grows the sense of gain | 8 | ·/˘····· |
| My life has found in having thee. | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| A deeper love, a deeper rest, | 8 | ·/˘··/˘· |
| A deeper joy in all I see; | 8 | ·/˘····· |
| And ever deeper in my breast | 8 | ·/˘/˘··· |
| A silver song that comes from thee! | 8 | ·/˘····· |
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.