Hits and Runs
I remember the Chillicothe ball players grappling the Rock Island ball players in a sixteen-inning game ended by darkness.And the shoulders of the Chillicothe players were a red smoke against the sundown and the shoulders of the Rock Island players were a yellow smoke against the sundown.And the umpire's voice was hoarse calling balls and strikes and outs and the umpire's throat fought in the dust for a song.
Words in this poem
- sundown n.
- The setting of the sun; sunset.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Hits and Runs 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, Hits and Runs, in Cornhuskers (1918), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-cornhuskers/hits-and-runs.html, id L29004.
Form and metre
Hits and Runs 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 |
|---|---|---|
| I remember the Chillicothe ball players grappling the Rock Island ball players in a sixteen-inning game ended by darkness. | 32 | ·˘/˘·/˘˘·/˘/˘··/˘·/˘··˘//˘·/˘·/˘ |
| And the shoulders of the Chillicothe players were a red smoke against the sundown and the shoulders of the Rock Island players were a yellow smoke against the sundown. | 41 | ··/˘··/˘˘/˘·······/···/˘···/˘/˘··/˘····/· |
| And the umpire's voice was hoarse calling balls and strikes and outs and the umpire's throat fought in the dust for a song. | 28 | ··/·˘···/˘·······/·˘········ |
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.