Bilbea
Bilbea, I was in Babylon on Saturday night.I saw nothing of you anywhere.I was at the old place and the other girls were there, but no Bilbea.
Have you gone to another house? or city?Why don't you write?I was sorry. I walked home half-sick.
Tell me how it goes.Send me some kind of a letter.And take care of yourself.
Words in this poem
- saturday n.
- The seventh or last day of the week; the day following Friday and preceding Sunday. [OE. Saterday, AS. Sæterdæg, Sæterndæg, Sæternesdæg, literally, Saturn's day, fr. L. Saturnus Saturn + AS. dæg day; cf. L. dies Saturni.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Bilbea 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, Bilbea, in Cornhuskers (1918), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-cornhuskers/bilbea.html, id L29024.
Form and metre
Bilbea is 9 lines in 3 stanzas of 3 lines each. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic tetrameter.
See other poems in iambic tetrameter.
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.
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 iambic tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Bilbea, I was in Babylon on Saturday night. | 13 | ·····/˘··/˘˘· |
| I saw nothing of you anywhere. | 9 | ··/˘··/˘· |
| I was at the old place and the other girls were there, but no Bilbea. | 17 | ········/˘······· |
| Have you gone to another house? or city? | 11 | ····˘/˘··/˘ |
| Why don't you write? | 4 | ···· |
| I was sorry. I walked home half-sick. | 9 | ··/˘····· |
| Tell me how it goes. | 5 | ····· |
| Send me some kind of a letter. | 8 | ······/˘ |
| And take care of yourself. | 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.