Buffalo Bill
Boy heart of Johnny Jones—aching to-day?Aching, and Buffalo Bill in town?Buffalo Bill and ponies, cowboys, Indians?
Some of us knowAll about it, Johnny Jones.
Buffalo Bill is a slanting look of the eyes,A slanting look under a hat on a horse.He sits on a horse and a passing look is fixedOn Johnny Jones, you and me, barelegged,A slanting, passing, careless look under a hat on a horse.
Go clickety-clack, O pony hoofs along the street.Come on and slant your eyes again, O Buffalo Bill.Give us again the ache of our boy hearts.Fill us again with the red love of prairies, dark nights, lonely wagons, and the crack-crack of rifles sputtering flashes into an ambush.
Words in this poem
- johnny n.
- A familiar diminutive of John.
- aching a.
- That aches; continuously painful. See Ache.
- barelegged a.
- Having the legs bare.
- ache n.
- A name given to several species of plants; as, smallage, wild celery, parsley. Holland. [F. ache, L. apium parsley.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Buffalo Bill 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, Buffalo Bill, in Cornhuskers (1918), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-cornhuskers/buffalo-bill.html, id L29029.
Form and metre
Buffalo Bill is 14 lines in 4 stanzas. The metre is iambic hexameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 84%).
See other poems in iambic 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.
- 3 -A--A eyes · horseA · fixed · barelegged · horseA
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 hexameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Boy heart of Johnny Jones—aching to-day? | 10 | ···/˘·/˘·· |
| Aching, and Buffalo Bill in town? | 9 | /˘·/˘···· |
| Buffalo Bill and ponies, cowboys, Indians? | 12 | /˘···/˘/·/˘˘ |
| Some of us know | 4 | ···· |
| All about it, Johnny Jones. | 7 | ····/˘· |
| Buffalo Bill is a slanting look of the eyes, | 12 | /˘····/˘···· |
| A slanting look under a hat on a horse. | 11 | ·/˘········ |
| He sits on a horse and a passing look is fixed | 12 | ·······/˘··· |
| On Johnny Jones, you and me, barelegged, | 9 | ·/˘····/˘ |
| A slanting, passing, careless look under a hat on a horse. | 15 | ·/˘/˘/˘········ |
| Go clickety-clack, O pony hoofs along the street. | 13 | ······/˘·˘/·· |
| Come on and slant your eyes again, O Buffalo Bill. | 13 | ······˘/·/˘·· |
| Give us again the ache of our boy hearts. | 11 | ··˘/···/˘·· |
| Fill us again with the red love of prairies, dark nights, lonely wagons, and the crack-crack of rifles sputtering flashes into an ambush. | 34 | ··˘/·····/˘··/˘/˘·····/˘/˘˘/˘···/· |
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.