In Poppy Fields
Here the poppy hosts assemble:How they startle, how they tremble!All their royal hoods unpinnedBlow out lightly in the wind.Here is gold to labor for;Here is pillage worth a war.
Men that in the cities grind,Come! before the heart is blind.
About this text
In Poppy Fields is in the public domain. This text is taken from The man with the hoe, and other poems, Project Gutenberg ebook #67012; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Edwin Markham, In Poppy Fields, in The Man with the Hoe, and Other Poems (1899), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #67012, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/markham-man-with-hoe/in-poppy-fields.html, id L24779.
Form and metre
In Poppy Fields is 8 lines in 2 stanzas. The metre is trochaic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 98%).
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 AABBCC assembleA · trembleA · unpinnedB · windB · forC · warC
- 2 AA grindA · blindA
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Here the poppy hosts assemble: | 8 | ··/˘·˘/˘ |
| How they startle, how they tremble! | 8 | ··/˘··/˘ |
| All their royal hoods unpinned | 7 | ··/˘··· |
| Blow out lightly in the wind. | 7 | ··/˘··· |
| Here is gold to labor for; | 7 | ····/˘· |
| Here is pillage worth a war. | 7 | ··/˘··· |
| Men that in the cities grind, | 7 | ····/˘· |
| Come! before the heart is blind. | 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.