Mill-Doors
You never come back.I say good-by when I see you going in the doors,The hopeless open doors that call and waitAnd take you then for—how many cents a day?How many cents for the sleepy eyes and fingers?
I say good-by because I know they tap your wrists,In the dark, in the silence, day by day,And all the blood of you drop by drop,And you are old before you are young.You never come back.
About this text
Mill-Doors 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, Mill-Doors, in Chicago Poems (1916), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-chicago-poems/mill-doors.html, id L28856.
Form and metre
Mill-Doors 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.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| You never come back. | 5 | ·/˘·· |
| I say good-by when I see you going in the doors, | 13 | ········/˘··· |
| The hopeless open doors that call and wait | 10 | ·/˘/˘····· |
| And take you then for—how many cents a day? | 11 | ······/˘··· |
| How many cents for the sleepy eyes and fingers? | 12 | ·/˘···/˘··/˘ |
| I say good-by because I know they tap your wrists, | 12 | ············ |
| In the dark, in the silence, day by day, | 10 | ·····/˘··· |
| And all the blood of you drop by drop, | 9 | ········· |
| And you are old before you are young. | 9 | ········· |
| You never come back. | 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.