Pals
Take a hold nowOn the silver handles here,Six silver handles,One for each of his old pals.
Take holdAnd lift him down the stairs,Put him on the rollersOver the floor of the hearse.
Take him on the last haul,To the cold straight house,The level even house,To the last house of all.
The dead say nothingAnd the dead know muchAnd the dead hold under their tonguesA locked-up story.
About this text
Pals 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, Pals, in Chicago Poems (1916), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-chicago-poems/pals.html, id L28961.
Form and metre
Pals is 16 lines in 4 stanzas of 4 lines each. The metre is iambic trimeter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 86%).
See other poems in iambic trimeter.
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 --AA now · here · handlesA · palsA
- 3 ABBA haulA · houseB · houseB · allA
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 iambic trimeter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Take a hold now | 4 | ···· |
| On the silver handles here, | 7 | ··/˘/˘· |
| Six silver handles, | 5 | ·/˘/˘ |
| One for each of his old pals. | 7 | ······· |
| Take hold | 2 | ·· |
| And lift him down the stairs, | 6 | ······ |
| Put him on the rollers | 6 | ····/˘ |
| Over the floor of the hearse. | 7 | ······· |
| Take him on the last haul, | 6 | ······ |
| To the cold straight house, | 5 | ····· |
| The level even house, | 6 | ·/˘/˘· |
| To the last house of all. | 6 | ······ |
| The dead say nothing | 5 | ···/˘ |
| And the dead know much | 5 | ····· |
| And the dead hold under their tongues | 8 | ········ |
| A locked-up story. | 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.