Losses
I have loveAnd a child,A banjoAnd shadows.(Losses of God,All will goAnd one dayWe will holdOnly the shadows.)
Words in this poem
- banjo n.
- A stringed musical instrument having a head and neck like the guitar, and its body like a tambourine. It has five strings, and is played with the fingers and hands.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Losses 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, Losses, in Chicago Poems (1916), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-chicago-poems/losses.html, id L28914.
Form and metre
Losses is 9 lines in a single stanza. The metre is trochaic dimeter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 84%).
See other poems in trochaic dimeter.
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 --AB-A--B love · child · banjoA · shadowsB · god · goA · day · hold · shadowsB
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 dimeter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| I have love | 3 | ··· |
| And a child, | 3 | ··· |
| A banjo | 3 | ·/· |
| And shadows. | 3 | ·/· |
| (Losses of God, | 4 | /˘·· |
| All will go | 3 | ··· |
| And one day | 3 | ··· |
| We will hold | 3 | ··· |
| Only the shadows.) | 5 | /˘·/· |
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.