Conquest
Hard, chilly colors:straw grey, frost greythe grey of frozen ground:and you, O sun,close above the horizon!It is I holds you--half against the skyhalf against a black tree trunkicily resplendent!
Lie there, blue city, mine at last--rimming the banked blue greyand rise, indescribable smoky yellowinto the overpowering white!
Words in this poem
- icily adv.
- In an icy manner; coldly.
- indescribable a.
- Incapable of being described.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Conquest is in the public domain. This text is taken from A Book of Poems, Al Que Quiere!, Project Gutenberg ebook #51997; 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 Carlos Williams, Conquest, in Al Que Quiere! (1917), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #51997, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/williams-al-que-quiere/conquest.html, id L01119.
Form and metre
Conquest is 13 lines in 2 stanzas. The metre is trochaic trimeter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 76%). 96% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 6.3 syllables. 4 lines end on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending. 38% of the lines run on without a stop at the line end.
See other poems in trochaic trimeter.
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---- colors · grey · ground · sunA · horizonA · you · sky · trunk · resplendent
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 trochaic trimeter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Hard, chilly colors: | 5 | ·/˘/˘ |
| straw grey, frost grey | 4 | ···· |
| the grey of frozen ground: | 6 | ···/˘· |
| and you, O sun, | 4 | ···· |
| close above the horizon! | 7 | ····˘/˘ |
| It is I holds you-- | 5 | ····· |
| half against the sky | 5 | ····· |
| half against a black tree trunk | 7 | ······· |
| icily resplendent! | 6 | /˘˘˘/˘ |
| Lie there, blue city, mine at last-- | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| rimming the banked blue grey | 6 | /˘···· |
| and rise, indescribable smoky yellow | 11 | ···˘/˘˘/˘/˘ |
| into the overpowering white! | 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.