Portrait of a Motor Car
It's a lean car...a long-legged dog of a car...a gray-ghost eagle car.The feet of it eat the dirt of a road...the wings of it eat the hills.Danny the driver dreams of it when he sees women in red skirts and red sox in his sleep.It is in Danny's life and runs in the blood of him...a lean gray-ghost car.
Words in this poem
- ghost n.
- The spirit; the soul of man. [OE. gast, gost, soul, spirit, AS. gast breath, spirit, soul; akin to OS. g spirit, soul, D. geest, G. geist, and prob. to E. gaze, ghastly.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Portrait of a Motor Car 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, Portrait of a Motor Car, in Cornhuskers (1918), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-cornhuskers/portrait-of-a-motor-car.html, id L29027.
Form and metre
Portrait of a Motor Car 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.
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 A--A carA · hills · sleep · carA
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 |
|---|---|---|
| It's a lean car...a long-legged dog of a car...a gray-ghost eagle car. | 18 | ······/˘·······/˘· |
| The feet of it eat the dirt of a road...the wings of it eat the hills. | 17 | ················· |
| Danny the driver dreams of it when he sees women in red skirts and red sox in his sleep. | 22 | /˘·/˘······/˘········· |
| It is in Danny's life and runs in the blood of him...a lean gray-ghost car. | 18 | ···/˘············· |
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.