Fire-Logs
Nancy Hanks dreams by the fire;Dreams, and the logs sputter,And the yellow tongues climb.Red lines lick their way in flickers.Oh, sputter, logs.Oh, dream, Nancy.Time now for a beautiful child.Time now for a tall man to come.
Words in this poem
- sputter v. i.
- To spit, or to emit saliva from the mouth in small, scattered portions, as in rapid speaking. [From the root of spout or spit to eject from the mputh. Cf. Splutter.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Fire-Logs 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, Fire-Logs, in Cornhuskers (1918), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-cornhuskers/fire-logs.html, id L29019.
Form and metre
Fire-Logs is 8 lines in a single stanza. The metre is trochaic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 76%).
See other poems in trochaic 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 trochaic tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Nancy Hanks dreams by the fire; | 8 | /˘····/˘ |
| Dreams, and the logs sputter, | 6 | ····/˘ |
| And the yellow tongues climb. | 6 | ··/˘·· |
| Red lines lick their way in flickers. | 8 | ······/˘ |
| Oh, sputter, logs. | 4 | ·/˘· |
| Oh, dream, Nancy. | 4 | ··/˘ |
| Time now for a beautiful child. | 8 | ····/˘˘· |
| Time now for a tall man to come. | 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.