Under a Telephone Pole
I am a copper wire slung in the air,Slim against the sun I make not even a clear line of shadow.Night and day I keep singing—humming and thrumming:It is love and war and money; it is the fighting and the tears, the work and want,Death and laughter of men and women passing through me, carrier of your speech,In the rain and the wet dripping, in the dawn and the shine drying,A copper wire.
Words in this poem
- dripping n.
- A falling in drops, or the sound so made.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Under a Telephone Pole 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, Under a Telephone Pole, in Chicago Poems (1916), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-chicago-poems/under-a-telephone-pole.html, id L28985.
Form and metre
Under a Telephone Pole is 7 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 --A--A- air · shadow · thrummingA · want · speech · dryingA · wire
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 |
|---|---|---|
| I am a copper wire slung in the air, | 11 | ···/˘/˘···· |
| Slim against the sun I make not even a clear line of shadow. | 16 | ········/˘····/· |
| Night and day I keep singing—humming and thrumming: | 12 | ·····/˘/˘··· |
| It is love and war and money; it is the fighting and the tears, the work and want, | 20 | ······/˘···/˘······· |
| Death and laughter of men and women passing through me, carrier of your speech, | 19 | ··/˘···/˘/˘··/˘˘··· |
| In the rain and the wet dripping, in the dawn and the shine drying, | 16 | ······/˘······/˘ |
| A copper wire. | 5 | ·/˘/˘ |
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.