Phosphor—Hesper
O morning star, farewell!My love I now must leave;The hours of day I slowly tell,And turn to her with the twilight bell,--O welcome, star of eve!
About this text
Phosphor—Hesper 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, Phosphor—Hesper, in The Poems of Henry Van Dyke (1925), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #16229, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/van-dyke-poems/phosphor-hesper.html, id L22885.
Form and metre
Phosphor—Hesper is 5 lines in a single stanza. It rhymes ABAAB. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic pentameter.
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 ABAAB farewellA · leaveB · tellA · bellA · eveB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| O morning star, farewell! | 6 | ·/˘··/ |
| My love I now must leave; | 6 | ······ |
| The hours of day I slowly tell, | 9 | ·/˘···/˘· |
| And turn to her with the twilight bell,-- | 9 | ······/·· |
| O welcome, star of eve! | 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.