Unborn
Swift across the night a little cry,Against the cold white night a stain of red.The moon dips down,The dull winds blow.My unborn son is dead.
Words in this poem
- unborn a.
- Not born; no yet brought into life; being still to appear; future.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Unborn 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, Unborn, in Mid-American Chants (1918), text of Internet Archive, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/anderson-mid-american-chants/unborn.html, id L29480.
Form and metre
Unborn is 5 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 cry · redA · down · blow · deadA
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Swift across the night a little cry, | 9 | ·˘/···/˘· |
| Against the cold white night a stain of red. | 10 | ·········· |
| The moon dips down, | 4 | ···· |
| The dull winds blow. | 4 | ···· |
| My unborn son is dead. | 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.