The Road at My Door
An affable Irregular,A heavily built Falstaffan man,Comes cracking jokes of civil warAs though to die by gunshot wereThe finest play under the sun.
A brown Lieutenant and his men,Half dressed in national uniform,Stand at my door, and I complainOf the foul weather, hail and rain,A pear tree broken by the storm.
I count those feathered balls of sootThe moor-hen guides upon the stream,To silence the envy in my thought;And turn towards my chamber, caughtIn the cold snows of a dream.
Words in this poem
- gunshot n.
- Act of firing a gun; a shot.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
The Road at My Door 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, The Road at My Door, in The Tower (1928), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #72985, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/yeats-tower/the-road-at-my-door.html, id L19964.
Form and metre
The Road at My Door is 15 lines in 3 stanzas of 5 lines each. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 86%).
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.
- 2 -ABBA men · uniformA · complainB · rainB · stormA
- 3 -ABBA soot · streamA · thoughtB · caughtB · dreamA
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 |
|---|---|---|
| An affable Irregular, | 8 | ·/˘˘˘/˘˘ |
| A heavily built Falstaffan man, | 8 | ·/˘····· |
| Comes cracking jokes of civil war | 8 | ·/˘··/˘· |
| As though to die by gunshot were | 8 | ·····/·· |
| The finest play under the sun. | 8 | ·/˘····· |
| A brown Lieutenant and his men, | 8 | ··˘/˘··· |
| Half dressed in national uniform, | 8 | ···/˘/˘· |
| Stand at my door, and I complain | 8 | ······˘/ |
| Of the foul weather, hail and rain, | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| A pear tree broken by the storm. | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| I count those feathered balls of soot | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| The moor-hen guides upon the stream, | 8 | ········ |
| To silence the envy in my thought; | 9 | ·/˘·/˘··· |
| And turn towards my chamber, caught | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| In the cold snows of a dream. | 7 | ······· |
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.