Matins
Flowers rejoice when night is done,Lift their heads to greet the sun;Sweetest looks and odours raise,In a silent hymn of praise.
So my heart would turn awayFrom the darkness to the day;Lying open in God's sightLike a flower in the light.
About this text
Matins 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, Matins, in The Poems of Henry Van Dyke (1925), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #16229, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/van-dyke-poems/matins.html, id L22750.
Form and metre
Matins is 8 lines in 2 stanzas of 4 lines each. Every stanza rhymes AABB. The metre is trochaic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 93%).
See other poems in trochaic 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 AABB doneA · sunA · raiseB · praiseB
- 2 AABB awayA · dayA · sightB · lightB
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 trochaic tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Flowers rejoice when night is done, | 7 | /˘/···· |
| Lift their heads to greet the sun; | 7 | ······· |
| Sweetest looks and odours raise, | 7 | /˘··/˘· |
| In a silent hymn of praise. | 7 | ··/˘··· |
| So my heart would turn away | 7 | ·····˘/ |
| From the darkness to the day; | 7 | ··/˘··· |
| Lying open in God's sight | 7 | /˘/˘··· |
| Like a flower in the light. | 7 | ··/˘··· |
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.