Formal Description of “I Walk in Dreams of Poetry”

There are three stanzas of the poem “I Walk in Dreams of Poetry” by Catherine Warfield included in Virginia Lucas’s Scrapbook. In these three stanzas, the poem seems to be very basic and pretty straightforward, aside from the rhyme scheme. The poem, in its entirety, is a hymn ballad. It alternates between tetrameter and trimeter throughout all sections of the poem that she included, making it a true ballad. The poem only has a couple of exceptions to the meter. The fourth line of the third stanza, "Fountains so few can feel," is not purely iambic and seems to be trimeter with a trochee and two iambs. The final line,"Many a heart can feel," is also not purely iambic trimeter because it has an iamb, an anapest, and another iamb. 

The poem, over all, has a very inconsistent rhyme scheme. Even in the full version of “I Walk in Dreams of Poetry,” it never follows a set rhyme scheme. For the first stanza included in this poem, the rhyme scheme is ababcded, but for both of the other stanzas, the rhyme scheme is abcbdefe. There is only masculine rhyme throughout the stanzas in the scrapbook and there is only one instance of feminine rhyme in the entirety of Warfield’s poem, this being “heaven” and “given.” There are quite a few instances of “true rhyme” throughout the poem, in which Warfield rhymes words such as “tone” and “lone” that have the same stressed vowel sounds. There seems to be an example of alliteration at least once in every stanza used in the scrapbook. This includes examples such as “rich and rare” and “wo or weal.” There is a good mix of semivowel and mute consonants at the end of each line. The semivowels help carry the poem into the next line, such as the word “bow” and the mutes help break up the poem and give the reader a break, such as with the word “cloud.” This poem also includes end-stopped lines where every stanza ended with a period, expressing a complete thought.