Troths
Yellow dust on a bumble bee’s wing,Grey lights in a woman’s asking eyes,Red ruins in the changing sunset embers:I take you and pile high the memories.Death will break her claws on some I keep.
Words in this poem
- bumble n.
- The bittern. [Local, Eng.] [See Bump to boom.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Troths 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, Troths, in Chicago Poems (1916), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-chicago-poems/troths.html, id L28915.
Form and metre
Troths is 5 lines in a single stanza.
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 -AAA- wing · eyesA · embersA · memoriesA · keep
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Yellow dust on a bumble bee’s wing, | 9 | /˘···/˘·· |
| Grey lights in a woman’s asking eyes, | 9 | ····/˘/˘· |
| Red ruins in the changing sunset embers: | 11 | ·/˘··/˘/·/˘ |
| I take you and pile high the memories. | 10 | ·······/˘˘ |
| Death will break her claws on some I keep. | 9 | ········· |
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.