Night
Night.We creep through darkness 'neath a rotten wallWeighing a million tons.In the darkness, silence and a woman's cry.Black night,The longest, blackest, night of all our lives.Dear France—Put out your hand to us.
About this text
Night 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, in Mid-American Chants (1918), text of Internet Archive, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/anderson-mid-american-chants/night.html, id L29481.
Form and metre
Night is 8 lines in a single stanza. 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.
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 A---A--- nightA · wall · tons · cry · nightA · lives · france · us
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Night. | 1 | · |
| We creep through darkness 'neath a rotten wall | 10 | ···/˘··/˘· |
| Weighing a million tons. | 6 | /˘·/˘· |
| In the darkness, silence and a woman's cry. | 11 | ··/˘/˘··/˘· |
| Black night, | 2 | ·· |
| The longest, blackest, night of all our lives. | 11 | ·/˘/˘···/˘· |
| Dear France— | 2 | ·· |
| Put out your hand to us. | 6 | ······ |
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.