Wings of a Dove I
At sunset, when the rosy light was dyingFar down the pathway of the west,I saw a lonely dove in silence flying,To be at rest.
Pilgrim of air, I cried, could I but borrowThy wandering wings, thy freedom blest,I'd fly away from every careful sorrow,And find my rest.
Words in this poem
- pathway n.
- A footpath; a beaten track; any path or course. Also used figuratively.
- borrow v. t.
- To receive from another as a loan, with the implied or expressed intention of returning the identical article or its equivalent in kind; -- the opposite of lend. [OE. borwen, AS. borgian, fr. borg, borh, pledge; akin to D. borg, G. borg; prob. fr. root of AS. beorgan to protect. Borough.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Wings of a Dove I 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, Wings of a Dove I, in The Poems of Henry Van Dyke (1925), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #16229, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/van-dyke-poems/wings-of-a-dove-i.html, id L22753.
Form and metre
Wings of a Dove I is 8 lines in 2 stanzas of 4 lines each. The metre is iambic hexameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 88%).
See other poems in iambic hexameter.
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 dyingA · westB · flyingA · restB
- 2 -A-A borrow · blestA · sorrow · restA
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 hexameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| At sunset, when the rosy light was dying | 11 | ·/···/˘··/˘ |
| Far down the pathway of the west, | 8 | ···/···· |
| I saw a lonely dove in silence flying, | 11 | ···/˘··/˘/˘ |
| To be at rest. | 4 | ···· |
| Pilgrim of air, I cried, could I but borrow | 11 | /˘·······/· |
| Thy wandering wings, thy freedom blest, | 9 | ·/˘˘··/˘· |
| I'd fly away from every careful sorrow, | 11 | ··˘/·/˘/˘/˘ |
| And find my rest. | 4 | ···· |
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.