Track-Workers
The rails you carry cut into your hands,Like the sharp lips of an unsought lover.As you stumble over the tiesSunlight is clinging, yellow spitRaining down upon your faces.You are the living cuspidors of day.Dirt, its teasing ghost, dust,And passionless kicks of steel, fill you.Flowers sprouting near the tracks,Brush their lightly odoured handsIn vain against your stale jackets of sweat.Within you, minds and heartsAre snoring to the curt rhythm of your breath.You do not see this blustering blackbirdPromenading on a barbed-wire fence.He eyes you with spritelike hauteur,Unable to understandWhy your motions endlessly copy each other,One of you, a meek and burly Pole,Peers a moment at the strutting blackbirdWith a fleeting shade of dull resentment....There is always one among youWho recoils from glimpsing corpses.
Words in this poem
- ghost n.
- The spirit; the soul of man. [OE. gast, gost, soul, spirit, AS. gast breath, spirit, soul; akin to OS. g spirit, soul, D. geest, G. geist, and prob. to E. gaze, ghastly.]
- passionless a.
- Void of passion; without anger or emotion; not easily excited; calm.
- hauteur n.
- Haughty manner or spirit; haughtiness; pride; arrogance. [F., fr. haut high. See Haughty.]
- endlessly adv.
- In an endless manner.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Track-Workers is in the public domain. This text is taken from Advice: A Book of Poems, Project Gutenberg ebook #60252; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Maxwell Bodenheim, Track-Workers, in Advice: A Book of Poems (1920), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #60252, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/bodenheim-advice/track-workers.html, id L23391.
Form and metre
Track-Workers is 23 lines in a single stanza. The metre is trochaic pentameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 78%).
See other poems in trochaic 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-B-B--C-A---D-----D-C- handsA · lover · tiesB · spit · facesB · day · dust · youC · tracks · handsA · sweat · hearts · breath · blackbirdD · fence · hauteur · understand · other · pole · blackbirdD · resentment · youC · corpses
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 trochaic pentameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| The rails you carry cut into your hands, | 10 | ···/˘····· |
| Like the sharp lips of an unsought lover. | 10 | ········/˘ |
| As you stumble over the ties | 8 | ··/˘···· |
| Sunlight is clinging, yellow spit | 8 | /··/˘/˘· |
| Raining down upon your faces. | 8 | /˘····/˘ |
| You are the living cuspidors of day. | 10 | ···/˘····· |
| Dirt, its teasing ghost, dust, | 6 | ··/˘·· |
| And passionless kicks of steel, fill you. | 9 | ·/˘˘····· |
| Flowers sprouting near the tracks, | 7 | /˘/˘··· |
| Brush their lightly odoured hands | 8 | ··/˘/˘˘· |
| In vain against your stale jackets of sweat. | 10 | ······/˘·· |
| Within you, minds and hearts | 6 | ······ |
| Are snoring to the curt rhythm of your breath. | 11 | ·/˘···/˘··· |
| You do not see this blustering blackbird | 9 | ·····/˘/˘ |
| Promenading on a barbed-wire fence. | 9 | ·˘/˘···/· |
| He eyes you with spritelike hauteur, | 9 | ········· |
| Unable to understand | 7 | ˘/˘··˘/ |
| Why your motions endlessly copy each other, | 11 | ··/˘/˘/˘·/˘ |
| One of you, a meek and burly Pole, | 9 | ······/˘· |
| Peers a moment at the strutting blackbird | 10 | ··/˘··/˘/˘ |
| With a fleeting shade of dull resentment.... | 10 | ··/˘···˘/˘ |
| There is always one among you | 8 | ··/····· |
| Who recoils from glimpsing corpses. | 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.