Old Osawatomie
John Brown's body under the morning stars.Six feet of dust under the morning stars.And a panorama of war performs itselfOver the six-foot stage of circling armies.Room for Gettysburg, Wilderness, Chickamauga,On a six-foot stage of dust.
About this text
Old Osawatomie 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, Old Osawatomie, in Cornhuskers (1918), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-cornhuskers/old-osawatomie.html, id L29085.
Form and metre
Old Osawatomie is 6 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---- starsA · starsA · itself · armies · chickamauga · dust
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 |
|---|---|---|
| John Brown's body under the morning stars. | 10 | ··/˘···/˘· |
| Six feet of dust under the morning stars. | 10 | ·······/˘· |
| And a panorama of war performs itself | 12 | ···˘/˘··˘/˘/ |
| Over the six-foot stage of circling armies. | 12 | ·······/˘˘/˘ |
| Room for Gettysburg, Wilderness, Chickamauga, | 12 | ··/˘˘/˘˘···· |
| On a six-foot stage of dust. | 7 | ······· |
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.