Still Life
Cool your heels on the rail of an observation car.Let the engineer open her up for ninety miles an hour.Take in the prairie right and left, rolling land and new hay crops, swaths of new hay laid in the sun.A gray village flecks by and the horses hitched in front of the post-office never blink an eye.A barnyard and fifteen Holstein cows, dabs of white on a black wall map, never blink an eye.A signalman in a tower, the outpost of Kansas City, keeps his place at a window with the serenity of a bronze statue on a dark night when lovers pass whispering.
Words in this poem
- blink v. i.
- To wink; to twinkle with, or as with, the eye. [OE. blenken; akin to dan. blinke, Sw. blinka, G. blinken to shine, glance, wink, twinkle, D. blinken to shine; and prob. to D. blikken to glance, twinkle, G. bl]
- barnyard n.
- A yard belonging to a barn.
- holstein n.
- One of a breed of cattle, originally from Schleswig-Holstein, valued for the large amount of milk produced by the cows. The color is usually black and white in irregular patches.
- signalman n.
- A man whose business is to manage or display signals; especially, one employed in setting the signals by which railroad trains are run or warned.
- kansas n.
- A tribe of Indians allied to the Winnebagoes and Osages. They formerly inhabited the region which is now the State of Kansas, but were removed to the Indian Territory.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Still Life 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, Still Life, in Cornhuskers (1918), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-cornhuskers/still-life.html, id L29008.
Form and metre
Still Life 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- car · hour · sun · eyeA · eyeA · whispering
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Cool your heels on the rail of an observation car. | 13 | ·········˘/˘· |
| Let the engineer open her up for ninety miles an hour. | 16 | ··/˘//˘···/˘··/˘ |
| Take in the prairie right and left, rolling land and new hay crops, swaths of new hay laid in the sun. | 23 | ···/˘···/˘············· |
| A gray village flecks by and the horses hitched in front of the post-office never blink an eye. | 23 | ··/˘····/˘······/˘/˘··· |
| A barnyard and fifteen Holstein cows, dabs of white on a black wall map, never blink an eye. | 22 | ·/··˘//··········/˘··· |
| A signalman in a tower, the outpost of Kansas City, keeps his place at a window with the serenity of a bronze statue on a dark night when lovers pass whispering. | 45 | ·/˘˘··/˘·/··/˘/˘·····/˘··˘/˘˘···/······/˘·/˘˘ |
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.