To Julia Marlowe (Reading Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn)
Long had I loved this "Attic shape," the bredeOf marble maidens round this urn divine:But when your golden voice began to read,The empty urn was filled with Chian wine.
Words in this poem
- chian a.
- Of or pertaining to Chios, an island in the Ægean Sea. Chian earth, a dense, compact kind of earth, from Chios, used anciently as an astringent and a cosmetic.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
To Julia Marlowe (Reading Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn) 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 Julia Marlowe (Reading Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn), in The Poems of Henry Van Dyke (1925), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #16229, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/van-dyke-poems/to-julia-marlowe-reading-keats-ode-on-a-grecian-urn.html, id L22877.
Form and metre
To Julia Marlowe (Reading Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn) is 4 lines in a single stanza. It rhymes ABAB. 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 ABAB bredeA · divineB · readA · wineB
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Long had I loved this "Attic shape," the brede | 10 | ·····/˘··· |
| Of marble maidens round this urn divine: | 10 | ·/˘/˘···˘/ |
| But when your golden voice began to read, | 10 | ···/˘·˘/·· |
| The empty urn was filled with Chian 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.