The Walking Man of Rodin
Legs hold a torso away from the earth.And a regular high poem of legs is here.Powers of bone and cord raise a belly and lungsOut of ooze and over the loam where eyes look and ears hearAnd arms have a chance to hammer and shoot and run motors.You make usProud of our legs, old man.
And you left off the head here,The skull found always crumbling neighbor of the ankles.
Words in this poem
- torso n.
- The human body, as distinguished from the head and limbs; in sculpture, the trunk of a statue, mutilated of head and limbs; as, the torso of Hercules. [It. torso, probably fr. L. thyrsus a stalk, stem, thyrsus, Gr. torso, turso, a stalk, stem, G. dorsche a cabbage stalk. Cf. Thyrsus, Truss.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
The Walking Man of Rodin 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 Walking Man of Rodin, in Chicago Poems (1916), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-chicago-poems/the-walking-man-of-rodin.html, id L28860.
Form and metre
The Walking Man of Rodin is 9 lines in 2 stanzas.
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--- earth · hereA · lungs · hearA · motors · us · man
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Legs hold a torso away from the earth. | 10 | ···/·˘/··· |
| And a regular high poem of legs is here. | 12 | ··/˘˘·/˘···· |
| Powers of bone and cord raise a belly and lungs | 12 | /˘······/˘·· |
| Out of ooze and over the loam where eyes look and ears hear | 14 | ·············· |
| And arms have a chance to hammer and shoot and run motors. | 14 | ······/˘····/˘ |
| You make us | 3 | ··· |
| Proud of our legs, old man. | 7 | ··/˘··· |
| And you left off the head here, | 7 | ······· |
| The skull found always crumbling neighbor of the ankles. | 14 | ···/·/˘˘/˘··/˘ |
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.