Flat Lands
Flat lands on the end of town where real estate men are crying new subdivisions,The sunsets pour blood and fire over you hundreds and hundreds of nights, flat lands—blood and fire of sunsets thousands of years have been pouring over you.And the stars follow the sunsets. One gold star. A shower of blue stars. Blurs of white and gray stars. Vast marching processions of stars arching over you flat lands where frogs sob this April night."Lots for Sale—Easy Terms" run letters painted on a board—and the stars wheel onward, the frogs sob this April night.
About this text
Flat Lands 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, Flat Lands, in Cornhuskers (1918), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-cornhuskers/flat-lands.html, id L29048.
Form and metre
Flat Lands is 4 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets, 50% of the lines: octosyllabic couplets. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic tetrameter.
See other poems in octosyllabic couplets, 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.
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.
- 1 --AA subdivisions · you · nightA · nightA
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Flat lands on the end of town where real estate men are crying new subdivisions, | 20 | ·········˘/··/˘·/˘·˘ |
| The sunsets pour blood and fire over you hundreds and hundreds of nights, flat lands—blood and fire of sunsets thousands of years have been pouring over you. | 38 | ·/····/˘···/˘·/˘······/˘·/·/˘····/˘··· |
| And the stars follow the sunsets. One gold star. A shower of blue stars. Blurs of white and gray stars. Vast marching processions of stars arching over you flat lands where frogs sob this April night. | 45 | ···/˘·/·····/˘··········/˘˘/˘··/˘·········/˘· |
| "Lots for Sale—Easy Terms" run letters painted on a board—and the stars wheel onward, the frogs sob this April night. | 27 | ···/˘··/˘/˘·······/˘····/˘· |
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.