Champs d’Honneur
Soldiers never do die well;Crosses mark the places—Wooden crosses where they fell,Stuck above their faces.Soldiers pitch and cough and twitch—All the world roars red and black;Soldiers smother in a ditch,Choking through the whole attack.
Words in this poem
- choking a.
- That chokes; producing the feeling of strangulation.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Champs d’Honneur is in the public domain. This text is taken from Three Stories & Ten Poems (poems only), Project Gutenberg ebook #59603; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Ernest Hemingway, Champs d’Honneur, in Ten Poems (1923), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #59603, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/hemingway-ten-poems/champs-d-honneur.html, id L27122.
Form and metre
Champs d’Honneur is 8 lines in a single stanza. It rhymes ABABCDCD. The metre is trochaic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 95%).
See other poems in trochaic tetrameter.
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 ABABCDCD wellA · placesB · fellA · facesB · twitchC · blackD · ditchC · attackD
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 tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Soldiers never do die well; | 7 | /˘/˘··· |
| Crosses mark the places— | 6 | /˘··/˘ |
| Wooden crosses where they fell, | 7 | /˘/˘··· |
| Stuck above their faces. | 6 | ····/˘ |
| Soldiers pitch and cough and twitch— | 7 | /˘····· |
| All the world roars red and black; | 7 | ······· |
| Soldiers smother in a ditch, | 7 | /˘/˘··· |
| Choking through the whole attack. | 7 | /˘···˘/ |
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.