Cartoon
I am making a Cartoon of a Woman. She is the People. She is the Great Dirty Mother.And Many Children hang on her Apron, crawl at her Feet, snuggle at her Breasts.
Words in this poem
- cartoon n.
- A design or study drawn of the full size, to serve as a model for transferring or copying; -- used in the making of mosaics, tapestries, fresco pantings and the like; as, the cartoons of Raphael. [F. carton (cf. It. cartons pasteboard, cartoon.); fr. L. charta. See 1st card.]
- crawl v. i.
- To move slowly by drawing the body along the ground, as a worm; to move slowly on hands and kness; to creep. [Dan. kravle, or Icel. krafla, to paw, scrabble with the hands; akin to Sw. kr to crawl; cf. LG. krabbeln, D. krabbelen to scratch.]
- snuggle v. t.
- To move one way and the other so as to get a close place; to lie close for comfort; to cuddle; to nestle. [Freq. of snug.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Cartoon 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, Cartoon, in Cornhuskers (1918), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-cornhuskers/cartoon.html, id L29037.
Form and metre
Cartoon is 2 lines in a single stanza. 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 |
|---|---|---|
| I am making a Cartoon of a Woman. She is the People. She is the Great Dirty Mother. | 24 | ··/˘·˘/··/˘···/˘····/˘/˘ |
| And Many Children hang on her Apron, crawl at her Feet, snuggle at her Breasts. | 19 | ·/˘/˘···/˘····/˘··· |
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.