All Day Long
All day long in fog and wind,The waves have flung their beating crestsAgainst the palisades of adamant.My boy, he went to sea, long and long ago,Curls of brown were slipping underneath his cap,He looked at me from blue and steely eyes;Natty, straight and true, he stepped away,My boy, he went to sea.All day long in fog and wind,The waves have flung their beating crestsAgainst the palisades of adamant.
Words in this poem
- went n.
- Course; way; path; journey; direction.
- steely a.
- Made of steel; consisting of steel.
- natty a.
- Neat; tidy; spruce. -- Nat"ti*ly, adv. [Cf. Neat clean.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
All Day Long is in the public domain. This text is taken from Chicago Poems, Wikisource; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Carl Sandburg, All Day Long, in Chicago Poems (1916), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-chicago-poems/all-day-long.html, id L28975.
Form and metre
All Day Long is 11 lines in a single stanza. The metre is iambic pentameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 91%).
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 ABC-----ABC windA · crestsB · adamantC · ago · cap · eyes · away · sea · windA · crestsB · adamantC
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 |
|---|---|---|
| All day long in fog and wind, | 7 | ······· |
| The waves have flung their beating crests | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| Against the palisades of adamant. | 10 | ····˘/·/˘˘ |
| My boy, he went to sea, long and long ago, | 11 | ·········˘/ |
| Curls of brown were slipping underneath his cap, | 11 | ····/˘·˘/·· |
| He looked at me from blue and steely eyes; | 10 | ·······/˘· |
| Natty, straight and true, he stepped away, | 9 | /˘·····˘/ |
| My boy, he went to sea. | 6 | ······ |
| All day long in fog and wind, | 7 | ······· |
| The waves have flung their beating crests | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| Against the palisades of adamant. | 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.