The Red Cross
Sign of the Love DivineThat bends to bear the loadOf all who suffer, all who bleed,Along life's thorny road:
Sign of the Heart Humane,That through the darkest fightWould bring to wounded friend and foeA ministry of light:
O dear and holy sign,Lead onward like a star!The armies of the just are thine,And all we have and are.
Words in this poem
- humane a.
- Pertaining to man; human. Jer. Taylor. [L. humanus: cf. F. humain. See Human.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
The Red Cross 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 Red Cross, in The Poems of Henry Van Dyke (1925), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #16229, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/van-dyke-poems/the-red-cross.html, id L22947.
Form and metre
The Red Cross is 12 lines in 3 stanzas of 4 lines each. The metre is short measure, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 92%).
See other poems in short measure.
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 -A-A divine · loadA · bleed · roadA
- 2 -A-A humane · fightA · foe · lightA
- 3 ABAB signA · starB · thineA · areB
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 short measure. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Sign of the Love Divine | 6 | ····˘/ |
| That bends to bear the load | 6 | ······ |
| Of all who suffer, all who bleed, | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| Along life's thorny road: | 6 | ˘/·/˘· |
| Sign of the Heart Humane, | 6 | ····˘/ |
| That through the darkest fight | 6 | ···/˘· |
| Would bring to wounded friend and foe | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| A ministry of light: | 6 | ·/˘˘·· |
| O dear and holy sign, | 6 | ···/˘· |
| Lead onward like a star! | 6 | ·/˘··· |
| The armies of the just are thine, | 8 | ·/˘····· |
| And all we have and are. | 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.