Back Yard
Shine on, O moon of summer.Shine to the leaves of grass, catalpa and oak,All silver under your rain to-night.
An Italian boy is sending songs to you to-night from an accordion.A Polish boy is out with his best girl; they marry next month; to-night they are throwing you kisses.
An old man next door is dreaming over a sheen that sits in a cherry tree in his back yard.
The clocks say I must go—I stay here sitting on the back porch drinking white thoughts you rain down.
Shine on, O moon,Shake out more and more silver changes.
Words in this poem
- accordion n.
- A small, portable, keyed wind instrument, whose tones are generated by play of the wind upon free metallic reeds. [See Accord.]
- sheen v. i.
- To shine; to glisten.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Back Yard 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, Back Yard, in Chicago Poems (1916), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-chicago-poems/back-yard.html, id L28946.
Form and metre
Back Yard is 9 lines in 5 stanzas.
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.
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. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Shine on, O moon of summer. | 7 | ·····/˘ |
| Shine to the leaves of grass, catalpa and oak, | 11 | ······˘/˘·· |
| All silver under your rain to-night. | 9 | ·/˘······ |
| An Italian boy is sending songs to you to-night from an accordion. | 19 | ·˘/˘··/˘·······˘/˘˘ |
| A Polish boy is out with his best girl; they marry next month; to-night they are throwing you kisses. | 24 | ·/˘········/˘······/˘·/˘ |
| An old man next door is dreaming over a sheen that sits in a cherry tree in his back yard. | 23 | ······/˘········/˘····· |
| The clocks say I must go—I stay here sitting on the back porch drinking white thoughts you rain down. | 22 | ·········/˘····/˘····· |
| Shine on, O moon, | 4 | ···· |
| Shake out more and more silver changes. | 9 | ·····/˘/˘ |
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.