Joy, Shipmate, Joy!
Joy, shipmate, Joy!(Pleas’d to my soul at death I cry,)Our life is closed, our life begins,The long, long anchorage we leave,The ship is clear at last, she leaps!She swiftly courses from the shore,Joy, shipmate, joy.
Words in this poem
- shipmate n.
- One who serves on board of the same ship with another; a fellow sailor.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Joy, Shipmate, Joy! 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, Joy, Shipmate, Joy!, in Leaves of Grass (1855–1892), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #1322, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/whitman-leaves/joy-shipmate-joy.html, id L04069.
Form and metre
Joy, Shipmate, Joy! is 7 lines in a single stanza. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 91%). 91% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 7.1 syllables.
See other poems in iambic tetrameter.
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 joyA · cry · begins · leave · leaps · shore · joyA
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 tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Joy, shipmate, Joy! | 4 | ·/·· |
| (Pleas’d to my soul at death I cry,) | 8 | ········ |
| Our life is closed, our life begins, | 10 | /˘···/˘·˘/ |
| The long, long anchorage we leave, | 8 | ···/˘˘·· |
| The ship is clear at last, she leaps! | 8 | ········ |
| She swiftly courses from the shore, | 8 | ·/˘/˘··· |
| Joy, shipmate, joy. | 4 | ·/·· |
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.