The Everlasting Voices
O sweet everlasting Voices be still;Go to the guards of the heavenly foldAnd bid them wander obeying your willFlame under flame, till Time be no more;Have you not heard that our hearts are old,That you call in birds, in wind on the hill,In shaken boughs, in tide on the shore?O sweet everlasting Voices be still.
About this text
The Everlasting Voices 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, The Everlasting Voices, in The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #32233, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/yeats-wind-among-reeds/the-everlasting-voices.html, id L04514.
Form and metre
The Everlasting Voices is 8 lines in a single stanza. It rhymes ABACBACA. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic tetrameter. 95% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 9.5 syllables. 25% of the lines run on without a stop at the line end.
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.
- 1 ABACBACA stillA · foldB · willA · moreC · oldB · hillA · shoreC · stillA
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 |
|---|---|---|
| O sweet everlasting Voices be still; | 10 | ···˘/˘/˘·· |
| Go to the guards of the heavenly fold | 10 | ······/˘˘· |
| And bid them wander obeying your will | 10 | ···/˘˘/˘·· |
| Flame under flame, till Time be no more; | 9 | ········· |
| Have you not heard that our hearts are old, | 10 | ·····/˘··· |
| That you call in birds, in wind on the hill, | 10 | ·········· |
| In shaken boughs, in tide on the shore? | 9 | ·/˘······ |
| O sweet everlasting Voices be still. | 10 | ···˘/˘/˘·· |
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.