Prayers of Steel
Lay me on an anvil, O God.Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar.Let me pry loose old walls.Let me lift and loosen old foundations.
Lay me on an anvil, O God.Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike.Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together.Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders.Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through blue nights into white stars.
Words in this poem
- crowbar n.
- A bar of iron sharpened at one end, and used as a lever.
- skyscraper n.
- A name for the one of the fancy sails alleged to have been sometimes set above the skysail.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Prayers of Steel 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, Prayers of Steel, in Cornhuskers (1918), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-cornhuskers/prayers-of-steel.html, id L29034.
Form and metre
Prayers of Steel is 9 lines in 2 stanzas. 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Lay me on an anvil, O God. | 8 | ····/˘·· |
| Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar. | 11 | ···/˘····/· |
| Let me pry loose old walls. | 6 | ······ |
| Let me lift and loosen old foundations. | 10 | ····/˘·˘/˘ |
| Lay me on an anvil, O God. | 8 | ····/˘·· |
| Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike. | 11 | ···/˘······ |
| Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together. | 16 | ·····/˘···/·˘˘/˘ |
| Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders. | 16 | ···/˘·/˘····/˘/˘ |
| Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through blue nights into white stars. | 19 | ······/˘·/·˘······· |
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.