Grass
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.Shovel them under and let me work—I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at GettysburgAnd pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.Shovel them under and let me work.Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:What place is this?Where are we now?
I am the grass.Let me work.
About this text
Grass 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, Grass, in Cornhuskers (1918), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-cornhuskers/grass.html, id L29086.
Form and metre
Grass is 11 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. | 13 | ··/˘······/˘· |
| Shovel them under and let me work— | 9 | /˘······· |
| I am the grass; I cover all. | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| And pile them high at Gettysburg | 8 | ·····/˘˘ |
| And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. | 9 | ·······/˘ |
| Shovel them under and let me work. | 9 | /˘······· |
| Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor: | 13 | ·····/˘˘··˘/˘ |
| What place is this? | 4 | ···· |
| Where are we now? | 4 | ···· |
| I am the grass. | 4 | ···· |
| Let me work. | 3 | ··· |
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.