Trafficker
Among the shadows where two streets cross,A woman lurks in the dark and waitsTo move on when a policeman heaves in view.Smiling a broken smile from a facePainted over haggard bones and desperate eyes,All night she offers passers-by what they willOf her beauty wasted, body faded, claims gone,And no takers.
Words in this poem
- heaves n.
- A disease of horses, characterized by difficult breathing, with heaving of the flank, wheezing, flatulency, and a peculiar cough; broken wind.
- haggard a.
- Wild or intractable; disposed to break away from duty; untamed; as, a haggard or refractory hawk. Shak [F. hagard; of German origin, and prop. meaning, of the hegde or woods, wild, untamed. See Hedge, 1st Haw, and -ard.]
- desperate a.
- Without hope; given to despair; hopeless. [L. desperatus, p. p. of desperare. See Despair, and cf. Desperado.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Trafficker 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, Trafficker, in Chicago Poems (1916), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-chicago-poems/trafficker.html, id L28968.
Form and metre
Trafficker is 8 lines in a single stanza. The metre is trochaic hexameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 79%).
See other poems in trochaic hexameter.
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 cross · waits · view · face · eyesA · will · gone · takersA
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 trochaic hexameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Among the shadows where two streets cross, | 9 | ···/····· |
| A woman lurks in the dark and waits | 9 | ·/˘······ |
| To move on when a policeman heaves in view. | 11 | ·····˘/˘··· |
| Smiling a broken smile from a face | 9 | /˘·/˘···· |
| Painted over haggard bones and desperate eyes, | 11 | /˘··/˘··/˘· |
| All night she offers passers-by what they will | 11 | ···/˘/˘···· |
| Of her beauty wasted, body faded, claims gone, | 12 | ··/˘/˘/˘/˘·· |
| And no takers. | 4 | ··/˘ |
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.