To Joseph Jefferson
We met on Nature's stage,And May had set the scene,With bishop-caps standing in delicate ranks,And violets blossoming over the banks,While the brook ran full between.
The waters rang your call,With frolicsome waves a-twinkle,--They knew you as boy, and they knew you as man,And every wave, as it merrily ran,Cried, "Enter Rip van Winkle!"
Words in this poem
- twinkle v. i.
- To open and shut the eye rapidly; to blink; to wink. [OE. twinklen, AS. twinclian; akin to OE. twinken to blink, wink, G. zwinken, zwinkern, and perhaps to E. twitch.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
To Joseph Jefferson 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, To Joseph Jefferson, in The Poems of Henry Van Dyke (1925), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #16229, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/van-dyke-poems/to-joseph-jefferson.html, id L22878.
Form and metre
To Joseph Jefferson is 10 lines in 2 stanzas of 5 lines each. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic pentameter.
See 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 -ABBA stage · sceneA · ranksB · banksB · betweenA
- 2 AABBA callA · twinkleA · manB · ranB · winkleA
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 |
|---|---|---|
| We met on Nature's stage, | 6 | ···/˘· |
| And May had set the scene, | 6 | ······ |
| With bishop-caps standing in delicate ranks, | 10 | ·/˘·/˘·/˘· |
| And violets blossoming over the banks, | 10 | ·/˘˘/˘˘··· |
| While the brook ran full between. | 7 | ······· |
| The waters rang your call, | 6 | ·/˘··· |
| With frolicsome waves a-twinkle,-- | 8 | ·/˘˘··/˘ |
| They knew you as boy, and they knew you as man, | 11 | ··········· |
| And every wave, as it merrily ran, | 10 | ·/˘···/˘˘· |
| Cried, "Enter Rip van Winkle!" | 7 | ·/˘··/˘ |
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.