Ease
Lined coat, warm cap and easy felt slippers,In the little tower, at the low window, sitting over the sunkenbrazier.Body at rest, heart at peace; no need to rise early.I wonder if the courtiers at the Western Capital know of thesethings, or not?
Words in this poem
- brazier n.
- An artificer who works in brass. Franklin. [OE. brasiere, F. braise live coals. See Brass.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Ease is in the public domain. This text is taken from A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems, Project Gutenberg ebook #42290, the Arthur Waley translation; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Various, Ease, in A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #42290, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/waley-chinese/ease.html, id L18871.
Form and metre
Ease is 6 lines in a single stanza. The lines average 10.8 syllables. 4 lines end on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending.
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- slippersA · sunken · brazier · early · theseA · not
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. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Lined coat, warm cap and easy felt slippers, | 10 | ·····/˘·/˘ |
| In the little tower, at the low window, sitting over the sunken | 18 | ··/˘/˘···/˘/˘···/˘ |
| brazier. | 3 | /˘˘ |
| Body at rest, heart at peace; no need to rise early. | 13 | /˘·········/˘ |
| I wonder if the courtiers at the Western Capital know of these | 18 | ·/˘··/˘˘··/˘/˘˘··· |
| things, or not? | 3 | ··· |
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.