Illinois Farmer
Bury this old Illinois farmer with respect.He slept the Illinois nights of his life after days of work in Illinois cornfields.Now he goes on a long sleep.The wind he listened to in the cornsilk and the tassels, the wind that combed his red beard zero mornings when the snow lay white on the yellow ears in the bushel basket at the corncrib,The same wind will now blow over the place here where his hands must dream of Illinois corn.
Words in this poem
- illinois n.
- A tribe of North American Indians, which formerly occupied the region between the Wabash and Mississippi rivers.
- zero
- A cipher; nothing; naught. [F. zéro, from Ar. çafrun, çifrun, empty, a cipher. Cf. Cipher.]
- corncrib n.
- A crib for storing corn.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Illinois Farmer 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, Illinois Farmer, in Cornhuskers (1918), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-cornhuskers/illinois-farmer.html, id L29003.
Form and metre
Illinois Farmer is 5 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Bury this old Illinois farmer with respect. | 12 | /˘···˘//˘·˘/ |
| He slept the Illinois nights of his life after days of work in Illinois cornfields. | 21 | ····˘/···········˘/// |
| Now he goes on a long sleep. | 7 | ······· |
| The wind he listened to in the cornsilk and the tassels, the wind that combed his red beard zero mornings when the snow lay white on the yellow ears in the bushel basket at the corncrib, | 45 | ···/˘·······/˘·······/˘/˘·······/˘···/˘/˘··/· |
| The same wind will now blow over the place here where his hands must dream of Illinois corn. | 21 | ··················˘/· |
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.