The Prison and the Angel
Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul;Love is the only angel who can bid the gates unroll;And when he comes to call thee, arise and follow fast;His way may lie through darkness, but it leads to light at last.
Words in this poem
- unroll v. t.
- To open, as what is rolled or convolved; as, to unroll cloth; to unroll a banner. [1st pref. un- + roll.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
The Prison and the Angel 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 Prison and the Angel, in The Poems of Henry Van Dyke (1925), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #16229, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/van-dyke-poems/the-prison-and-the-angel.html, id L22891.
Form and metre
The Prison and the Angel 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 soulA · unrollA · fastB · lastB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul; | 13 | ···/˘/˘··/··· |
| Love is the only angel who can bid the gates unroll; | 14 | ···/˘/˘·····˘/ |
| And when he comes to call thee, arise and follow fast; | 13 | ·······˘/·/˘· |
| His way may lie through darkness, but it leads to light at last. | 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.