Drumnotes
Days of the dead men, Danny.Drum for the dead, drum on your remembering heart.
Jaurès, a great love-heart of France, a slug of lead in the red valves.Kitchener of Khartoum, tall, cold, proud, a shark's mouthful.Franz Josef, the old man of forty haunted kingdoms, in a tomb with the Hapsburg fathers, moths eating a green uniform to tatters, worms taking all and leaving only bones and gold buttons, bones and iron crosses.Jack London, Jim Riley, Verhaeren, riders to the republic of dreams.
Days of the dead, Danny.Drum on your remembering heart.
Words in this poem
- kitchener n.
- A kitchen servant; a cook. Carlyle.
- mouthful n.
- As much as is usually put into the mouth at one time.
- haunted a.
- Inhabited by, or subject to the visits of, apparitions; frequented by a ghost.
- republic n.
- Common weal. B. Jonson. [F. république, L. respublica commonwealth; res a thing, an affair + publicus, publica, public. See Real, a., and Public.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Drumnotes 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, Drumnotes, in Cornhuskers (1918), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-cornhuskers/drumnotes.html, id L29078.
Form and metre
Drumnotes is 8 lines in 3 stanzas. 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Days of the dead men, Danny. | 7 | ·····/˘ |
| Drum for the dead, drum on your remembering heart. | 12 | ·······˘/˘˘· |
| Jaurès, a great love-heart of France, a slug of lead in the red valves. | 15 | ··············· |
| Kitchener of Khartoum, tall, cold, proud, a shark's mouthful. | 13 | /˘˘··/·····/· |
| Franz Josef, the old man of forty haunted kingdoms, in a tomb with the Hapsburg fathers, moths eating a green uniform to tatters, worms taking all and leaving only bones and gold buttons, bones and iron crosses. | 53 | ·/˘····/˘/˘/˘·····/˘/˘·/˘··/˘··/˘·/˘··/˘/˘···/˘··/˘/˘ |
| Jack London, Jim Riley, Verhaeren, riders to the republic of dreams. | 18 | ·/˘·/˘···/˘··˘/˘·· |
| Days of the dead, Danny. | 6 | ····/˘ |
| Drum on your remembering heart. | 8 | ···˘/˘˘· |
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.