Handfuls
Blossoms of babiesBlinking their storiesCome softOn the dusk and the babble;Little red gamblers,Handfuls that slept in the dust.
Summers of rain,Winters of drift,Tell off the years;And they go backWho came soft—Back to the sod,To silence and dust;Gray gamblers,Handfuls again.
About this text
Handfuls 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, Handfuls, in Cornhuskers (1918), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-cornhuskers/handfuls.html, id L29081.
Form and metre
Handfuls is 15 lines in 2 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.
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.
- 2 A-------A rainA · drift · years · back · soft · sod · dust · gamblers · againA
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Blossoms of babies | 5 | /˘·/˘ |
| Blinking their stories | 5 | /˘·/˘ |
| Come soft | 2 | ·· |
| On the dusk and the babble; | 7 | ·····/˘ |
| Little red gamblers, | 5 | /˘·/˘ |
| Handfuls that slept in the dust. | 7 | /······ |
| Summers of rain, | 4 | /˘·· |
| Winters of drift, | 4 | /˘·· |
| Tell off the years; | 4 | ···· |
| And they go back | 4 | ···· |
| Who came soft— | 3 | ··· |
| Back to the sod, | 4 | ···· |
| To silence and dust; | 5 | ·/˘·· |
| Gray gamblers, | 3 | ·/˘ |
| Handfuls again. | 4 | /·˘/ |
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.