To Be Carved on a Stone at Ballylee
I, the poet William Yeats,With old mill boards and sea-green slates,And smithy work from the Gort forge,Restored this tower for my wife George;And may these characters remainWhen all is ruin once again.
Words in this poem
- smithy n.
- The workshop of a smith, esp. a blacksmith; a smithery; a stithy. [AS. smi, fr. smi; akin to D. smidse, smids, OHG. smitta, G. schmiede, Icel. smi. See Smith, n.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
To Be Carved on a Stone at Ballylee is in the public domain. This text is taken from Michael Robartes and the dancer, Project Gutenberg ebook #72987; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: W. B. Yeats, To Be Carved on a Stone at Ballylee, in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #72987, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/yeats-michael-robartes/to-be-carved-on-a-stone-at-ballylee.html, id L19955.
Form and metre
To Be Carved on a Stone at Ballylee is 6 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets: octosyllabic couplets. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 87%).
See other poems in octosyllabic couplets, 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 AABBCC yeatsA · slatesA · forgeB · georgeB · remainC · againC
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 |
|---|---|---|
| I, the poet William Yeats, | 7 | ··/˘/˘· |
| With old mill boards and sea-green slates, | 8 | ········ |
| And smithy work from the Gort forge, | 8 | ·/˘····· |
| Restored this tower for my wife George; | 8 | ˘/·/···· |
| And may these characters remain | 8 | ···/˘˘˘/ |
| When all is ruin once again. | 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.