Graves
I dreamed one man stood against a thousand,One man damned as a wrongheaded fool.One year and another he walked the streets,And a thousand shrugs and hootsMet him in the shoulders and mouths he passed.
He died aloneAnd only the undertaker came to his funeral.
Flowers grow over his grave anod in the wind,And over the graves of the thousand, too,The flowers grow anod in the wind.
Flowers and the wind,Flowers anod over the graves of the dead,Petals of red, leaves of yellow, streaks of white,Masses of purple sagging . . .I love you and your great way of forgetting.
Words in this poem
- damned a.
- Sentenced to punishment in a future state; condemned; consigned to perdition.
- wrongheaded a.
- Wrong in opinion or principle; having a perverse understanding; perverse.
- undertaker n.
- One who undertakes; one who engages in any project or business.
- sagging n.
- A bending or sinking between the ends of a thing, in consequence of its own, or an imposed, weight; an arching downward in the middle, as of a ship after straining. Cf. Hogging.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Graves 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, Graves, in Chicago Poems (1916), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-chicago-poems/graves.html, id L28929.
Form and metre
Graves is 15 lines in 4 stanzas. The metre is trochaic pentameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 73%).
See other poems in trochaic 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.
- 3 A-A windA · too · windA
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 pentameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| I dreamed one man stood against a thousand, | 10 | ········/˘ |
| One man damned as a wrongheaded fool. | 9 | ·····/·˘· |
| One year and another he walked the streets, | 10 | ···˘/˘···· |
| And a thousand shrugs and hoots | 7 | ··/˘··· |
| Met him in the shoulders and mouths he passed. | 10 | ····/˘···· |
| He died alone | 4 | ··˘/ |
| And only the undertaker came to his funeral. | 14 | ·/˘·/˘·˘···/˘˘ |
| Flowers grow over his grave anod in the wind, | 12 | /˘·········· |
| And over the graves of the thousand, too, | 10 | ·······/˘· |
| The flowers grow anod in the wind. | 9 | ·/˘······ |
| Flowers and the wind, | 5 | /˘··· |
| Flowers anod over the graves of the dead, | 11 | /˘········· |
| Petals of red, leaves of yellow, streaks of white, | 11 | /˘····/˘··· |
| Masses of purple sagging . . . | 7 | /˘·/˘/˘ |
| I love you and your great way of forgetting. | 11 | ········˘/˘ |
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.