Personality (Musings of a Police Reporter in the Identification Bureau)
You have loved forty women, but you have only one thumb.You have led a hundred secret lives, but you mark only one thumb.You go round the world and fight in a thousand wars and win all the world's honors, but when you come back home the print of the one thumb your mother gave you is the same print of thumb you had in the old home when your mother kissed you and said good-by.Out of the whirling womb of time come millions of men and their feet crowd the earth and they cut one anothers' throats for room to stand and among them all are not two thumbs alike.Somewhere is a Great God of Thumbs who can tell the inside story of this.
Words in this poem
- womb n.
- The belly; the abdomen. [OE. wombe, wambe, AS. wamb, womb; akin to D. wam belly, OS. & OHG. wamba, G. wamme, wampe, Icel. vömb, Sw. v&mb, Dan. vom, Goth. wamba.]
- somewhere adv.
- In some place unknown or not specified; in one place or another.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Personality (Musings of a Police Reporter in the Identification Bureau) 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, Personality (Musings of a Police Reporter in the Identification Bureau), in Chicago Poems (1916), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-chicago-poems/personality.html, id L28880.
Form and metre
Personality (Musings of a Police Reporter in the Identification Bureau) is 5 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.
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--- thumbA · thumbA · by · alike · this
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 have loved forty women, but you have only one thumb. | 14 | ···/˘/˘···/˘·· |
| You have led a hundred secret lives, but you mark only one thumb. | 16 | ····/˘/˘····/˘·· |
| You go round the world and fight in a thousand wars and win all the world's honors, but when you come back home the print of the one thumb your mother gave you is the same print of thumb you had in the old home when your mother kissed you and said good-by. | 58 | ·········/˘······/˘·············/˘················/˘······ |
| Out of the whirling womb of time come millions of men and their feet crowd the earth and they cut one anothers' throats for room to stand and among them all are not two thumbs alike. | 42 | ···/˘····/˘·····························˘/ |
| Somewhere is a Great God of Thumbs who can tell the inside story of this. | 18 | /···········˘//˘·· |
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.