On Board Ship: Reading Yüan Chēn’s Poems
I take your poems in my hand and read them beside the candle;The poems are finished: the candle is low: dawn not yet come.With sore eyes by the guttering candle still I sit in the dark,Listening to waves that, driven by the wind, strike the prow ofthe ship.
About this text
On Board Ship: Reading Yüan Chēn’s Poems 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, On Board Ship: Reading Yüan Chēn’s Poems, in A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #42290, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/waley-chinese/on-board-ship-reading-y-an-ch-n-s-poems.html, id L18840.
Form and metre
On Board Ship: Reading Yüan Chēn’s Poems is 5 lines in a single stanza. The lines average 12.8 syllables. 1 line ends 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.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| I take your poems in my hand and read them beside the candle; | 16 | ···/˘······˘/·/˘ |
| The poems are finished: the candle is low: dawn not yet come. | 15 | ·/˘·/˘·/˘······ |
| With sore eyes by the guttering candle still I sit in the dark, | 16 | ·····/˘˘/˘······ |
| Listening to waves that, driven by the wind, strike the prow of | 15 | /˘˘···/˘······· |
| the ship. | 2 | ·· |
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.