Winter Night
My bed is so empty that I keep on waking up:As the cold increases, the night-wind begins to blow.It rustles the curtains, making a noise like the sea:Oh that those were waves which could carry me back to you!
About this text
Winter Night 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, Winter Night, in A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #42290, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/waley-chinese/winter-night.html, id L18803.
Form and metre
Winter Night is 4 lines in a single stanza. The lines average 13.0 syllables.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| My bed is so empty that I keep on waking up: | 13 | ····/˘····/˘· |
| As the cold increases, the night-wind begins to blow. | 13 | ···˘/˘···˘/·· |
| It rustles the curtains, making a noise like the sea: | 13 | ·/˘·/˘/˘····· |
| Oh that those were waves which could carry me back to you! | 13 | ·······/˘···· |
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.