The Lover
All night she walked and dreamed on the frozen road,She the insane one, feeling not thinking.All night she walked and wanted to kill,Wanted to love and kill.
What did she want?Nobody knew.None of us knew why she wantedTo kill.
We were the heavy ones, heavy and sure.The wind in the cornfields moved us not.We the Americans, worthy and sure,Worthy and sure of ourselves.
Tom killed his brother on Wednesday night,Back of the corncrib, under the hill.Then she ran to him, sobbing and calling,She who had loved and could not kill.
Words in this poem
- nobody n.
- No person; no one; not anybody. [No, a. + body.]
- corncrib n.
- A crib for storing corn.
- sobbing n.
- A series of short, convulsive inspirations, the glottis being suddenly closed so that little or no air enters into the lungs.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
The Lover 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, The Lover, in Mid-American Chants (1918), text of Internet Archive, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/anderson-mid-american-chants/the-lover.html, id L29476.
Form and metre
The Lover is 16 lines in 4 stanzas of 4 lines each. 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 --AA road · thinking · killA · killA
- 3 A-A- sureA · not · sureA · ourselves
- 4 -A-A night · hillA · calling · killA
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 |
|---|---|---|
| All night she walked and dreamed on the frozen road, | 11 | ········/˘· |
| She the insane one, feeling not thinking. | 10 | ··˘/·/˘·/˘ |
| All night she walked and wanted to kill, | 9 | ·····/˘·· |
| Wanted to love and kill. | 6 | /˘···· |
| What did she want? | 4 | ···· |
| Nobody knew. | 4 | /··· |
| None of us knew why she wanted | 8 | ······/˘ |
| To kill. | 2 | ·· |
| We were the heavy ones, heavy and sure. | 10 | ···/˘·/˘·· |
| The wind in the cornfields moved us not. | 9 | ····//··· |
| We the Americans, worthy and sure, | 10 | ··˘/˘˘/˘·· |
| Worthy and sure of ourselves. | 8 | /˘···˘˘/ |
| Tom killed his brother on Wednesday night, | 9 | ···/˘·/˘· |
| Back of the corncrib, under the hill. | 9 | ···/····· |
| Then she ran to him, sobbing and calling, | 10 | ·····/˘·/˘ |
| She who had loved and could not kill. | 8 | ········ |
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.