The Noon Hour
She sits in the dust at the wallsAnd makes cigars,Bending at the benchWith fingers wage-anxious,Changing her sweat for the day’s pay.
Now the noon hour has come,And she leans with her bare armsOn the window-sill over the river,Leans and feels at her throatCool-moving things out of the free open ways:
At her throat and eyes and nostrilsThe touch and the blowing coolOf great free ways beyond the walls.
About this text
The Noon Hour 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, The Noon Hour, in Chicago Poems (1916), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-chicago-poems/the-noon-hour.html, id L28983.
Form and metre
The Noon Hour is 13 lines in 3 stanzas. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 75%).
See other poems in iambic tetrameter.
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.
- 3 A-A nostrilsA · cool · wallsA
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 tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| She sits in the dust at the walls | 8 | ········ |
| And makes cigars, | 4 | ··˘/ |
| Bending at the bench | 5 | /˘··· |
| With fingers wage-anxious, | 6 | ·/˘·/˘ |
| Changing her sweat for the day’s pay. | 8 | /˘······ |
| Now the noon hour has come, | 7 | ···/˘·· |
| And she leans with her bare arms | 7 | ······· |
| On the window-sill over the river, | 10 | ··/˘····/˘ |
| Leans and feels at her throat | 6 | ······ |
| Cool-moving things out of the free open ways: | 11 | ·/˘·····/˘· |
| At her throat and eyes and nostrils | 8 | ······/˘ |
| The touch and the blowing cool | 7 | ····/˘· |
| Of great free ways beyond the walls. | 8 | ········ |
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.