June
Paula is digging and shaping the loam of a salvia,Scarlet Chinese talker of summer.Two petals of crabapple blossom blow fallen in Paula's hair,And fluff of white from a cottonwood.
Words in this poem
- salvia n.
- A genus of plants including the sage. See Sage. [L., sage.]
- fluff n.
- Nap or down; flue; soft, downy feathers.
- cottonwood n.
- An American tree of the genus Populus or polar, having the seeds covered with abundant cottonlike hairs; esp., the P. monilifera and P. angustifolia of the Western United States.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
June 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, June, in Chicago Poems (1916), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-chicago-poems/june.html, id L28952.
Form and metre
June is 4 lines in a single stanza.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Paula is digging and shaping the loam of a salvia, | 15 | /˘·/˘·/˘····/˘˘ |
| Scarlet Chinese talker of summer. | 9 | /˘˘//˘·/˘ |
| Two petals of crabapple blossom blow fallen in Paula's hair, | 16 | ·/˘····/˘·/˘·/˘· |
| And fluff of white from a cottonwood. | 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.