Aleel
She's bartered it away this very hour,As though we two were never in the world.
(He kneels beside her, but does not seem to hear her words. ThePEASANTS return. They carry the COUNTESS CATHLEEN and lay her uponthe ground before OONA and ALEEL. She lies there as if dead.)
Words in this poem
- countess n.
- The wife of an earl in the British peerage, or of a count in the Continental nobility; also, a lady possessed of the same dignity in her own right. See the Note under Count. [F. comtesse. See Count a nobleman.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Aleel is in the public domain. This text is taken from Poems, Project Gutenberg ebook #38877; 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, Aleel, in Poems (1895), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #38877, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/yeats-poems/aleel-5.html, id L16709.
Form and metre
Aleel is 5 lines in 2 stanzas. The lines average 13.4 syllables. 1 line ends on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending.
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.
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. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| She's bartered it away this very hour, | 11 | ·/˘·˘/·/˘/˘ |
| As though we two were never in the world. | 10 | ·····/˘··· |
| (He kneels beside her, but does not seem to hear her words. The | 14 | ··˘/·········· |
| PEASANTS return. They carry the COUNTESS CATHLEEN and lay her upon | 17 | /˘˘/·/˘·/˘·/····· |
| the ground before OONA and ALEEL. She lies there as if dead.) | 15 | ····/˘········· |
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.