Goldwing Moth
A goldwing moth is between the scissors and the ink bottle on the desk.Last night it flew hundreds of circles around a glass bulb and a flame wire.The wings are a soft gold; it is the gold of illuminated initials in manuscripts of the medieval monks.
About this text
Goldwing Moth 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, Goldwing Moth, in Cornhuskers (1918), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-cornhuskers/goldwing-moth.html, id L29063.
Form and metre
Goldwing Moth is 3 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 |
|---|---|---|
| A goldwing moth is between the scissors and the ink bottle on the desk. | 18 | ········/˘···/˘··· |
| Last night it flew hundreds of circles around a glass bulb and a flame wire. | 19 | ····/˘·/˘········/˘ |
| The wings are a soft gold; it is the gold of illuminated initials in manuscripts of the medieval monks. | 29 | ···········˘/˘·˘˘/˘·/˘···˘/˘· |
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.