The Door
The lintel low enough to keep out pomp and pride:The threshold high enough to turn deceit aside:The fastening strong enough from robbers to defend:This door will open at a touch to welcome every friend.
About this text
The Door 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, The Door, in The Poems of Henry Van Dyke (1925), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #16229, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/van-dyke-poems/the-door.html, id L22870.
Form and metre
The Door is 4 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets: heroic couplets. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic pentameter.
See other poems in heroic couplets, 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 AABB prideA · asideA · defendB · friendB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| The lintel low enough to keep out pomp and pride: | 12 | ·/˘·˘/······ |
| The threshold high enough to turn deceit aside: | 12 | ·/··˘/··˘/˘/ |
| The fastening strong enough from robbers to defend: | 12 | ·/˘·˘/·/˘·˘/ |
| This door will open at a touch to welcome every friend. | 14 | ···/˘····/˘/˘· |
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.