Picnic Boat
Sunday night and the park policemen tell each other it is dark as a stack of black cats on Lake Michigan.A big picnic boat comes home to Chicago from the peach farms of Saugatuck.Hundreds of electric bulbs break the night's darkness, a flock of red and yellow birds with wings at a standstill.Running along the deck railings are festoons and leaping in curves are loops of light from prow and stern to the tall smokestacks.Over the hoarse crunch of waves at my pier comes a hoarse answer in the rhythmic oompa of the brasses playing a Polish folk-song for the home-comers.
Words in this poem
- standstill n.
- A standing without moving forward or backward; a stop; a state or rest.
- crunch v. i.
- To chew with force and noise; to craunch. [Prob. of imitative origin; or cf. D. schransen to eat heartily, or E. scrunch.]
- rhythmic a.
- Pertaining to, or of the nature of, rhythm DAy and night I worked my rhythmic thought. Mrs. Browning. [Gr. rhythmicus, F. rhythmique.]
- folk n.
- In Anglo-Saxon times, the people of a group of townships or villages; a community; a tribe. [AS. folc; akin to D. volk, OS. & OHG. folk, G. volk, Icel. f, Sw. & Dan. folk, Lith. pulkas crowd, and perh. to E. follow.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Picnic Boat 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, Picnic Boat, in Chicago Poems (1916), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-chicago-poems/picnic-boat.html, id L28865.
Form and metre
Picnic Boat 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.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Sunday night and the park policemen tell each other it is dark as a stack of black cats on Lake Michigan. | 27 | /·····˘/˘··/˘···········/˘˘ |
| A big picnic boat comes home to Chicago from the peach farms of Saugatuck. | 19 | ··/·····˘/········· |
| Hundreds of electric bulbs break the night's darkness, a flock of red and yellow birds with wings at a standstill. | 26 | /˘·˘/˘····/˘·····/˘·····/· |
| Running along the deck railings are festoons and leaping in curves are loops of light from prow and stern to the tall smokestacks. | 29 | /˘˘/··/˘··/·/˘·············/· |
| Over the hoarse crunch of waves at my pier comes a hoarse answer in the rhythmic oompa of the brasses playing a Polish folk-song for the home-comers. | 37 | ·············/˘··/˘····/˘/˘·/˘·····/˘ |
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.