To My Heart, Bidding It Have No Fear
Be you still, be you still, trembling heart;Remember the wisdom out of the old days:Him who trembles before the flame and the flood,And the winds that blow through the starry ways,Let the starry winds and the flame and the floodCover over and hide, for he has no partWith the proud, majestical multitude.
Words in this poem
- starry a.
- Abounding with stars; adorned with stars.
- majestical a.
- Majestic. Cowley.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
To My Heart, Bidding It Have No Fear 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, To My Heart, Bidding It Have No Fear, in The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #32233, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/yeats-wind-among-reeds/to-my-heart-bidding-it-have-no-fear.html, id L04532.
Form and metre
To My Heart, Bidding It Have No Fear is 7 lines in a single stanza. The metre is iambic pentameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 73%). 87% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 10.3 syllables.
See 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 ABCBCA- heartA · daysB · floodC · waysB · floodC · partA · multitude
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Be you still, be you still, trembling heart; | 9 | ······/˘· |
| Remember the wisdom out of the old days: | 11 | ˘/˘·/˘····· |
| Him who trembles before the flame and the flood, | 11 | ··/˘······· |
| And the winds that blow through the starry ways, | 10 | ·······/˘· |
| Let the starry winds and the flame and the flood | 11 | ··/˘······· |
| Cover over and hide, for he has no part | 10 | /˘········ |
| With the proud, majestical multitude. | 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.