It Is Much
Women of night life amid the lightsWhere the line of your full, round throatsMatches in gleam the glint of your eyesAnd the ring of your heart-deep laughter:It is much to be warm and sure of to-morrow.
Women of night life along the shadows,Lean at your throats and skulking the walls,Gaunt as a bitch worn to the bone,Under the paint of your smiling faces:It is much to be warm and sure of to-morrow.
Words in this poem
- amid prep.
- In the midst or middle of; surrounded or encompassed by; among. [OE. amidde, amiddes, on midden, AS. on middan, in the middle, fr. midde the middle. The s is an adverbial ending, originally marking the genitive; the t is a la]
- glint n.
- A glimpse, glance, or gleam. [OE. glent.]
- gaunt a.
- Attenuated, as with fasting or suffering; lean; meager; pinched and grim. [Cf. Norw. gand a thin pointed stick, a tall and thin man, and W. gwan weak.]
- bitch n.
- The female of the canine kind, as of the dog, wolf, and fox. [OE. biche, bicche, AS. bicce; cf. Icel. bikkja, G. betze, peize.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
It Is Much 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, It Is Much, in Chicago Poems (1916), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-chicago-poems/it-is-much.html, id L28967.
Form and metre
It Is Much is 10 lines in 2 stanzas of 5 lines each.
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.
- 2 A--A- shadowsA · walls · bone · facesA · morrow
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Women of night life amid the lights | 9 | /˘···˘/·· |
| Where the line of your full, round throats | 8 | ········ |
| Matches in gleam the glint of your eyes | 9 | /˘······· |
| And the ring of your heart-deep laughter: | 9 | ·······/˘ |
| It is much to be warm and sure of to-morrow. | 12 | ··········/˘ |
| Women of night life along the shadows, | 10 | /˘···˘/·/· |
| Lean at your throats and skulking the walls, | 9 | ·····/˘·· |
| Gaunt as a bitch worn to the bone, | 8 | ········ |
| Under the paint of your smiling faces: | 10 | ······/˘/˘ |
| It is much to be warm and sure of to-morrow. | 12 | ··········/˘ |
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.