Muckers
Twenty men stand watching the muckers.Stabbing the sides of the ditchWhere clay gleams yellow,Driving the blades of their shovelsDeeper and deeper for the new gas mains,Wiping sweat off their facesWith red bandanas.The muckers work on . . pausing . . to pullTheir boots out of suckholes where they slosh.
Of the twenty looking onTen murmur, "O, it's a hell of a job,"Ten others, "Jesus, I wish I had the job."
Words in this poem
- mains n.
- The farm attached to a mansion house. [Scot. See Manse.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Muckers 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, Muckers, in Chicago Poems (1916), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-chicago-poems/muckers.html, id L28867.
Form and metre
Muckers is 12 lines in 2 stanzas. The metre is trochaic pentameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 71%).
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.
- 2 -AA on · jobA · jobA
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Twenty men stand watching the muckers. | 9 | /˘··/˘··· |
| Stabbing the sides of the ditch | 7 | /˘····· |
| Where clay gleams yellow, | 5 | ···/˘ |
| Driving the blades of their shovels | 8 | /˘····/˘ |
| Deeper and deeper for the new gas mains, | 10 | /˘·/˘····· |
| Wiping sweat off their faces | 7 | /˘···/˘ |
| With red bandanas. | 5 | ···/˘ |
| The muckers work on . . pausing . . to pull | 9 | ·····/˘·· |
| Their boots out of suckholes where they slosh. | 9 | ········· |
| Of the twenty looking on | 7 | ··/˘/˘· |
| Ten murmur, "O, it's a hell of a job," | 10 | ·/˘······· |
| Ten others, "Jesus, I wish I had the job." | 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.