Poppies
She loves blood-red poppies for a garden to walk in.In a loose white gown she walksand a new child tugs at cords in her body.Her head to the west at evening when the dew is creeping,A shudder of gladness runs in her bones and torsal fiber:She loves blood-red poppies for a garden to walk in.
Words in this poem
- torsal n.
- A torsel. Knight.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Poppies 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, Poppies, in Chicago Poems (1916), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-chicago-poems/poppies.html, id L28963.
Form and metre
Poppies is 6 lines in a single stanza. The metre is iambic heptameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 73%).
See other poems in iambic heptameter.
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 A----A inA · walks · body · creeping · fiber · inA
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 heptameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| She loves blood-red poppies for a garden to walk in. | 13 | ····/˘··/˘··· |
| In a loose white gown she walks | 7 | ······· |
| and a new child tugs at cords in her body. | 11 | ·········/˘ |
| Her head to the west at evening when the dew is creeping, | 14 | ······/˘····/˘ |
| A shudder of gladness runs in her bones and torsal fiber: | 15 | ·/˘·/˘·····/˘/˘ |
| She loves blood-red poppies for a garden to walk in. | 13 | ····/˘··/˘··· |
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.