A Visit
Westward the field of the cloth of gold.It is fall—see the gold in the dust of the fields.
Lay the golden cloth upon me. It is night and I come through the streets to your window.
The dust and the words are all gone, brushed away. Let me sleep.
About this text
A Visit is in the public domain. This text is taken from Mid-American Chants (New York: John Lane Company; London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1918), Internet Archive; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Sherwood Anderson, A Visit, in Mid-American Chants (1918), text of Internet Archive, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/anderson-mid-american-chants/a-visit.html, id L29482.
Form and metre
A Visit is 4 lines in 3 stanzas. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic pentameter.
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.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Westward the field of the cloth of gold. | 9 | /˘······· |
| It is fall—see the gold in the dust of the fields. | 12 | ············ |
| Lay the golden cloth upon me. It is night and I come through the streets to your window. | 21 | ··/˘···············/˘ |
| The dust and the words are all gone, brushed away. Let me sleep. | 14 | ·········˘/··· |
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.