New Feet
Empty battlefields keep their phantoms.Grass crawls over old gun wheelsAnd a nodding Canada thistle flings a purpleInto the summer's southwest wind,Wrapping a root in the rust of a bayonet,Reaching a blossom in rust of shrapnel.
Words in this poem
- shrapnel a.
- Applied as an appellation to a kind of shell invented by Gen.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
New Feet 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, New Feet, in Cornhuskers (1918), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-cornhuskers/new-feet.html, id L29084.
Form and metre
New Feet is 6 lines in a single stanza. The metre is trochaic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 70%).
See other poems in trochaic 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 trochaic tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Empty battlefields keep their phantoms. | 9 | /˘/˘···/˘ |
| Grass crawls over old gun wheels | 7 | ······· |
| And a nodding Canada thistle flings a purple | 13 | ··/˘/˘˘/˘··/˘ |
| Into the summer's southwest wind, | 8 | ···/˘·/· |
| Wrapping a root in the rust of a bayonet, | 12 | /˘·······/˘· |
| Reaching a blossom in rust of shrapnel. | 10 | /˘·/˘···/˘ |
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.