The Empty Quatrain
A flawless cup: how delicate and fineThe flowing curve of every jewelled line!Look, turn it up or down, 'tis perfect still,--But holds no drop of life's heart-warming wine.
Words in this poem
- flawless a.
- Free from flaws. Boyle.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
The Empty Quatrain 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 Empty Quatrain, in The Poems of Henry Van Dyke (1925), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #16229, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/van-dyke-poems/the-empty-quatrain.html, id L22880.
Form and metre
The Empty Quatrain is 4 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets, 50% of the lines: 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 AA-A fineA · lineA · still · wineA
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 |
|---|---|---|
| A flawless cup: how delicate and fine | 10 | ·/˘··/˘˘·· |
| The flowing curve of every jewelled line! | 10 | ·/··/˘˘/˘· |
| Look, turn it up or down, 'tis perfect still,-- | 10 | ·······˘/· |
| But holds no drop of life's heart-warming wine. | 10 | ·······/˘· |
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.