Fast Anchor’d Eternal o Love!
Fast-anchor’d eternal O love! O woman I love!O bride! O wife! more resistless than I can tell, the thought of you!Then separate, as disembodied or another born,Ethereal, the last athletic reality, my consolation,I ascend, I float in the regions of your love O man,O sharer of my roving life.
Words in this poem
- resistless a.
- Having no power to resist; making no opposition.
- sharer n.
- One who shares; a participator; a partaker; also, a divider; a distributer.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Fast Anchor’d Eternal o Love! is in the public domain. This text is taken from Leaves of Grass, Project Gutenberg ebook #1322; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Walt Whitman, Fast Anchor’d Eternal o Love!, in Leaves of Grass (1855–1892), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #1322, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/whitman-leaves/fast-anchor-d-eternal-o-love.html, id L03890.
Form and metre
Fast Anchor’d Eternal o Love! is 6 lines in a single stanza. The metre is iambic heptameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 72%). 74% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 13.8 syllables. 1 line ends on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending.
See other poems in iambic heptameter.
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- love · you · born · consolationA · manA · life
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 heptameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Fast-anchor’d eternal O love! O woman I love! | 13 | ·/˘˘/˘···/˘·· |
| O bride! O wife! more resistless than I can tell, the thought of you! | 16 | ·····˘/˘········ |
| Then separate, as disembodied or another born, | 14 | ·/˘··˘˘/˘·˘/˘· |
| Ethereal, the last athletic reality, my consolation, | 18 | ˘/˘˘··˘/˘˘/˘˘··˘/˘ |
| I ascend, I float in the regions of your love O man, | 14 | ·˘/····/˘····· |
| O sharer of my roving life. | 8 | ·/˘··/˘· |
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.