Moonset
Leaves of poplars pick Japanese prints against the west.Moon sand on the canal doubles the changing pictures.The moon's good-by ends pictures.The west is empty. All else is empty. No moon-talk at all now.Only dark listening to dark.
About this text
Moonset 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, Moonset, in Cornhuskers (1918), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-cornhuskers/moonset.html, id L29079.
Form and metre
Moonset 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.
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.
- 1 -AA-- west · picturesA · picturesA · now · dark
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Leaves of poplars pick Japanese prints against the west. | 13 | ··/˘··˘/····· |
| Moon sand on the canal doubles the changing pictures. | 13 | ····˘//˘·/˘/˘ |
| The moon's good-by ends pictures. | 7 | ·····/˘ |
| The west is empty. All else is empty. No moon-talk at all now. | 16 | ···/˘···/˘······ |
| Only dark listening to dark. | 8 | /˘·/˘˘·· |
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.