From ‘Oedipus at Colonus’ IV
Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eyeof day;The second best’s a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.
About this text
From ‘Oedipus at Colonus’ IV is in the public domain. This text is taken from The tower, Project Gutenberg ebook #72985; 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, From ‘Oedipus at Colonus’ IV, in The Tower (1928), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #72985, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/yeats-tower/from-oedipus-at-colonus-iv.html, id L19993.
Form and metre
From ‘Oedipus at Colonus’ IV is 4 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets, 50% of the lines: heroic couplets. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic pentameter.
See other poems in heroic couplets, other poems in iambic pentameter.
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-AA sayA · eye · dayA · awayA
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 pentameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say; | 10 | /·····/˘/· |
| Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye | 16 | /·······/······· |
| of day; | 2 | ·· |
| The second best’s a gay goodnight and quickly turn away. | 14 | ·/˘···/··/˘·˘/ |
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.