Night Whispers
Just midnight quiet and a sundered cloud,—mother I live—Aching and waiting to work my way through.
You of the long and the gaunt—silent and grim you stood.Terribly sweet the touch of your hand—mother, reach down.
Grey the walls and long the waiting—grey the age dust on the floor.If they whip and beat us, little mother, need we care?
Words in this poem
- aching a.
- That aches; continuously painful. See Ache.
- gaunt a.
- Attenuated, as with fasting or suffering; lean; meager; pinched and grim. [Cf. Norw. gand a thin pointed stick, a tall and thin man, and W. gwan weak.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Night Whispers 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, Night Whispers, in Mid-American Chants (1918), text of Internet Archive, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/anderson-mid-american-chants/night-whispers.html, id L29477.
Form and metre
Night Whispers is 6 lines in 3 stanzas of 2 lines each. The metre is iambic heptameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 82%).
See other poems in iambic heptameter.
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 heptameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Just midnight quiet and a sundered cloud,—mother I live— | 14 | ·/·/˘··/˘·/˘·· |
| Aching and waiting to work my way through. | 10 | /˘·/˘····· |
| You of the long and the gaunt—silent and grim you stood. | 13 | ·······/˘···· |
| Terribly sweet the touch of your hand—mother, reach down. | 13 | /˘˘······/˘·· |
| Grey the walls and long the waiting—grey the age dust on the floor. | 15 | ······/˘······· |
| If they whip and beat us, little mother, need we care? | 13 | ······/˘/˘··· |
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.