A Poet to His Beloved
I bring you with reverent handsThe books of my numberless dreams;White woman that passion has wornAs the tide wears the dove-gray sands,And with heart more old than the hornThat is brimmed from the pale fire of time:White woman with numberless dreamsI bring you my passionate rhyme.
Words in this poem
- numberless a.
- Innumerable; countless.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
A Poet to His Beloved is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Wind Among the Reeds, Project Gutenberg ebook #32233; 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, A Poet to His Beloved, in The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #32233, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/yeats-wind-among-reeds/a-poet-to-his-beloved.html, id L04530.
Form and metre
A Poet to His Beloved is 8 lines in a single stanza. It rhymes ABCACDBD. The metre is anapaestic trimeter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 92%). 76% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 8.1 syllables. 50% of the lines run on without a stop at the line end.
See other poems in anapaestic 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 ABCACDBD handsA · dreamsB · wornC · sandsA · hornC · timeD · dreamsB · rhymeD
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 anapaestic trimeter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| I bring you with reverent hands | 8 | ····/˘˘· |
| The books of my numberless dreams; | 8 | ····/˘˘· |
| White woman that passion has worn | 8 | ·/˘·/˘·· |
| As the tide wears the dove-gray sands, | 8 | ········ |
| And with heart more old than the horn | 8 | ········ |
| That is brimmed from the pale fire of time: | 9 | ······/·· |
| White woman with numberless dreams | 8 | ·/˘·/˘˘· |
| I bring you my passionate rhyme. | 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.