The children romp within the graveyard's pale;
The children romp within the graveyard's pale;The lark sings o'er a madhouse, or a gaol;--Such nice antitheses of perfect poiseChance in her curious rhetoric employs.
Words in this poem
- madhouse n.
- A house where insane persons are confined; an insane asylum; a bedlam.
- curious a.
- Difficult to please or satisfy; solicitous to be correct; careful; scrupulous; nice; exact. [OF. curios, curius, F. curieux, L. curiosus careful, inquisitive, fr. cura care. See Cure.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
The children romp within the graveyard's pale; is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Poems of William Watson, Project Gutenberg ebook #13179; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: William Watson, The children romp within the graveyard's pale;, in The Poems of William Watson (1892–1905), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #13179, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/watson-poems/the-children-romp-within-the-graveyard-s-pale.html, id L26229.
Form and metre
The children romp within the graveyard's pale; is 4 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets, 50% of the lines: heroic couplets. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic pentameter.
See other poems in heroic couplets, 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 --AA pale · gaol · poiseA · employsA
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 |
|---|---|---|
| The children romp within the graveyard's pale; | 10 | ·/˘····/·· |
| The lark sings o'er a madhouse, or a gaol;-- | 10 | ·····/···· |
| Such nice antitheses of perfect poise | 10 | ·······˘/· |
| Chance in her curious rhetoric employs. | 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.