Seasons
Sweet in summer, cups of snow,Cooling thirsty lips aglow;Sweet to sailors winter-bound,Spring arrives with garlands crowned;Sweeter yet the hour that coversWith one cloak a pair of lovers,Living lost in golden weather,While they talk of love together.
Words in this poem
- cooling a.
- Adapted to cool and refresh; allaying heat.
- aglow adv.
- In a glow; glowing; as, cheeks aglow; the landscape all aglow. [Pref. a- + glow.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Seasons 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, Seasons, in The Poems of Henry Van Dyke (1925), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #16229, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/van-dyke-poems/seasons.html, id L22886.
Form and metre
Seasons is 8 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets. The metre is trochaic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 98%).
See other poems in rhyming couplets, 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 AABBCCDD snowA · aglowA · boundB · crownedB · coversC · loversC · weatherD · togetherD
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Sweet in summer, cups of snow, | 7 | ··/˘··· |
| Cooling thirsty lips aglow; | 7 | /˘/˘·˘/ |
| Sweet to sailors winter-bound, | 7 | ··/˘/˘· |
| Spring arrives with garlands crowned; | 7 | ·˘/·/˘· |
| Sweeter yet the hour that covers | 8 | /˘··/·/˘ |
| With one cloak a pair of lovers, | 8 | ······/˘ |
| Living lost in golden weather, | 8 | /˘··/˘/˘ |
| While they talk of love together. | 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.