Monosyllabic
Let me be monosyllabic to-day, O Lord.Yesterday I loosed a snarl of words on a fool,on a child.To-day, let me be monosyllabic...a crony of old men who wash sunlight in their fingers and enjoy slow-pacing clocks.
Words in this poem
- monosyllabic a.
- Being a monosyllable, or composed of monosyllables; as, a monosyllabic word; a monosyllabic language. [Cf. F. monosyllabique.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Monosyllabic 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, Monosyllabic, in Cornhuskers (1918), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-cornhuskers/monosyllabic.html, id L29059.
Form and metre
Monosyllabic is 4 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Let me be monosyllabic to-day, O Lord. | 12 | ············ |
| Yesterday I loosed a snarl of words on a fool, | 12 | /˘·········· |
| on a child. | 3 | ··· |
| To-day, let me be monosyllabic...a crony of old men who wash sunlight in their fingers and enjoy slow-pacing clocks. | 31 | ···········/˘·····/···/˘·˘/·/˘· |
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.