Remembered Women
For a woman's face remembered as a spot of quick light on the flat land of dark night,For this memory of one mouth and a forehead they go on in the gray rain and the mud, they go on among the boots and guns.The horizon ahead is a thousand fang flashes, it is a row of teeth that bite on the flanks of night, the horizon sings of a new kill and a big kill.The horizon behind is a wall of dark etched with a memory, fixed with a woman's face—they fight on and on, boots in the mud and heads in the gray rain—for the women they hate and the women they love—for the women they left behind, they fight on.
Words in this poem
- ahead adv.
- In or to the front; in advance; onward. [Pref. a- + head.]
- fang v. t.
- To catch; to seize, as with the teeth; to lay hold of; to gripe; to clutch. [OE. fangen, fongen, fon (g orig. only in p.p. and imp. tense), AS. f; akin to D. vangen, OHG. fahan, G. fahen, fangen, Isel. fa, Sw. f, f, Dan. fange, faae, Got]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Remembered Women 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, Remembered Women, in Cornhuskers (1918), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-cornhuskers/remembered-women.html, id L29092.
Form and metre
Remembered Women 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.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| For a woman's face remembered as a spot of quick light on the flat land of dark night, | 21 | ··/˘·˘/˘············· |
| For this memory of one mouth and a forehead they go on in the gray rain and the mud, they go on among the boots and guns. | 31 | ··/˘˘·····/˘··················· |
| The horizon ahead is a thousand fang flashes, it is a row of teeth that bite on the flanks of night, the horizon sings of a new kill and a big kill. | 39 | ·˘/˘˘/··/˘·/˘··············˘/˘········· |
| The horizon behind is a wall of dark etched with a memory, fixed with a woman's face—they fight on and on, boots in the mud and heads in the gray rain—for the women they hate and the women they love—for the women they left behind, they fight on. | 61 | ·˘/˘··········/˘˘···/˘··················/˘····/˘····/˘······· |
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.