Memory
One had a lovely face,And two or three had charm,But charm and face were in vainBecause the mountain grassCannot but keep the formWhere the mountain hare has lain.
About this text
Memory is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Wild Swans at Coole, Project Gutenberg ebook #32491; 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, Memory, in The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #32491, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/yeats-wild-swans/memory.html, id L20015.
Form and metre
Memory is 6 lines in a single stanza. The metre is iambic trimeter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 92%).
See other poems in iambic 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 --A--A face · charm · vainA · grass · form · lainA
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 trimeter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| One had a lovely face, | 6 | ···/˘· |
| And two or three had charm, | 6 | ······ |
| But charm and face were in vain | 7 | ······· |
| Because the mountain grass | 6 | ···/˘· |
| Cannot but keep the form | 6 | /˘···· |
| Where the mountain hare has lain. | 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.