Southern Pacific
Huntington sleeps in a house six feet long.Huntington dreams of railroads he built and owned.Huntington dreams of ten thousand. men saying: Yes, sir.
Blithery sleeps in a house six feet long.Blithery dreams of rails and ties he laid.Blithery dreams of saying to Huntington: Yes, sir.
Huntington,Blithery, sleep in houses six feet long.
About this text
Southern Pacific 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, Southern Pacific, in Cornhuskers (1918), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-cornhuskers/southern-pacific.html, id L29025.
Form and metre
Southern Pacific is 8 lines in 3 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Huntington sleeps in a house six feet long. | 10 | /˘˘······· |
| Huntington dreams of railroads he built and owned. | 10 | /˘··/····· |
| Huntington dreams of ten thousand. men saying: Yes, sir. | 12 | /˘···/˘·/˘·· |
| Blithery sleeps in a house six feet long. | 10 | ·········· |
| Blithery dreams of rails and ties he laid. | 10 | ·········· |
| Blithery dreams of saying to Huntington: Yes, sir. | 12 | ·····/˘·/˘·· |
| Huntington, | 3 | /˘˘ |
| Blithery, sleep in houses six feet long. | 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.