The Unpardonable Sin
This is the sin against the Holy Ghost:--To speak of bloody power as right divine,And call on God to guard each vile chief's house,And for such chiefs, turn men to wolves and swine:--
To go forth killing in White Mercy's name,Making the trenches stink with spattered brains,Tearing the nerves and arteries apart,Sowing with flesh the unreaped golden plains.
In any Church's name, to sack fair towns,And turn each home into a screaming sty,To make the little children fugitive,And have their mothers for a quick death cry,--
This is the sin against the Holy Ghost:This is the sin no purging can atone:--To send forth rapine in the name of Christ:--To set the face, and make the heart a stone.
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.]
- screaming a.
- Uttering screams; shrieking.
- atone v. t.
- To set at one; to reduce to concord; to reconcile, as parties at variance; to appease.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
The Unpardonable Sin is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Congo, and Other Poems, Project Gutenberg ebook #1021; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Vachel Lindsay, The Unpardonable Sin, in The Congo and Other Poems (1914), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #1021, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/lindsay-congo/the-unpardonable-sin.html, id L01001.
Form and metre
The Unpardonable Sin is 16 lines in 4 stanzas of 4 lines each. The metre is iambic pentameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 90%). 93% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 9.9 syllables. 1 line ends on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending.
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 ghost · divineA · house · swineA
- 2 -A-A name · brainsA · apart · plainsA
- 3 -A-A towns · styA · fugitive · cryA
- 4 -A-A ghost · atoneA · christ · stoneA
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 |
|---|---|---|
| This is the sin against the Holy Ghost:-- | 10 | ·······/˘· |
| To speak of bloody power as right divine, | 10 | ···/˘/··˘/ |
| And call on God to guard each vile chief's house, | 10 | ·········· |
| And for such chiefs, turn men to wolves and swine:-- | 10 | ·········· |
| To go forth killing in White Mercy's name, | 10 | ···/˘··/˘· |
| Making the trenches stink with spattered brains, | 10 | /˘·/˘··/˘· |
| Tearing the nerves and arteries apart, | 9 | /˘···/˘˘/ |
| Sowing with flesh the unreaped golden plains. | 10 | /˘·····/˘· |
| In any Church's name, to sack fair towns, | 10 | ·/˘/˘····· |
| And turn each home into a screaming sty, | 10 | ·······/˘· |
| To make the little children fugitive, | 9 | ···/˘/˘/˘ |
| And have their mothers for a quick death cry,-- | 10 | ···/˘····· |
| This is the sin against the Holy Ghost: | 10 | ·······/˘· |
| This is the sin no purging can atone:-- | 10 | ·····/˘·˘/ |
| To send forth rapine in the name of Christ:-- | 10 | ···/˘····· |
| To set the face, and make the heart a stone. | 10 | ·········· |
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.