Baby Face
White Moon comes in on a baby face.The shafts across her bed are flimmering.
Out on the land White Moon shines,Shines and glimmers against gnarled shadows,All silver to slow twisted shadowsFalling across the long road that runs from the house.
Keep a little of your beautyAnd some of your flimmering silverFor her by the window to-nightWhere you come in, White Moon.
Words in this poem
- gnarled a.
- Knotty; full of knots or gnarls; twisted; crossgrained.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Baby Face is in the public domain. This text is taken from Cornhuskers, 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, Baby Face, in Cornhuskers (1918), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-cornhuskers/baby-face.html, id L29076.
Form and metre
Baby Face is 10 lines in 3 stanzas. The metre is trochaic pentameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 74%).
See other poems in trochaic pentameter.
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.
- 2 -AA- shines · shadowsA · shadowsA · house
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 pentameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| White Moon comes in on a baby face. | 9 | ······/˘· |
| The shafts across her bed are flimmering. | 10 | ··˘/······ |
| Out on the land White Moon shines, | 7 | ······· |
| Shines and glimmers against gnarled shadows, | 9 | ··/˘···/· |
| All silver to slow twisted shadows | 9 | ·/˘··/˘/· |
| Falling across the long road that runs from the house. | 12 | /˘˘/········ |
| Keep a little of your beauty | 8 | ··/˘··/˘ |
| And some of your flimmering silver | 9 | ·······/˘ |
| For her by the window to-night | 8 | ····/˘·· |
| Where you come in, White Moon. | 6 | ······ |
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.