In Tall Grass
Bees and a honeycomb in the dried head of a horse in a pasture corner—a skull in the tall grass and a buzz and a buzz of the yellow honey-hunters.
And I ask no better a winding sheet(over the earth and under the sun.)
Let the bees go honey-hunting with yellow blur of wings in the dome of my head, in the rumbling, singing arch of my skull.
Let there be wings and yellow dust and the drone of dreams of honey—who loses and remembers?—who keeps and forgets?
In a blue sheen of moon over the bones and under the hanging honeycomb the bees come home and the bees sleep.
Words in this poem
- rumbling
- a. & n. from Rumble, v. i.
- sheen v. i.
- To shine; to glisten.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
In Tall 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, In Tall Grass, in Cornhuskers (1918), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-cornhuskers/in-tall-grass.html, id L29057.
Form and metre
In Tall Grass is 6 lines in 5 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Bees and a honeycomb in the dried head of a horse in a pasture corner—a skull in the tall grass and a buzz and a buzz of the yellow honey-hunters. | 39 | ···/˘··········/˘/˘··············/˘/˘/˘ |
| And I ask no better a winding sheet | 10 | ····/˘·/˘· |
| (over the earth and under the sun.) | 9 | ········· |
| Let the bees go honey-hunting with yellow blur of wings in the dome of my head, in the rumbling, singing arch of my skull. | 31 | ····/˘/˘·/˘···········/˘˘/˘···· |
| Let there be wings and yellow dust and the drone of dreams of honey—who loses and remembers?—who keeps and forgets? | 28 | ·····/˘·······/˘·/˘·˘/˘···˘/ |
| In a blue sheen of moon over the bones and under the hanging honeycomb the bees come home and the bees sleep. | 27 | ··············/˘/˘········· |
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.