Pool
Out of the fireCame a man sunkenTo less than cinders,A tea-cup of ashes or so.And I,The gold in the house,Writhed into a stiff pool.
About this text
Pool 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, Pool, in Chicago Poems (1916), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-chicago-poems/pool.html, id L28906.
Form and metre
Pool is 7 lines in a single stanza. The metre is iambic trimeter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 78%).
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.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Out of the fire | 5 | ···/˘ |
| Came a man sunken | 5 | ···/˘ |
| To less than cinders, | 5 | ···/˘ |
| A tea-cup of ashes or so. | 8 | ····/˘·· |
| And I, | 2 | ·· |
| The gold in the house, | 5 | ····· |
| Writhed into a stiff pool. | 6 | ······ |
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.