Village in Late Summer
Lips half-willing in a doorway.Lips half-singing at a window.Eyes half-dreaming in the walls.Feet half-dancing in a kitchen.Even the clocks half-yawn the hoursAnd the farmers make half-answers.
Words in this poem
- doorway n.
- The passage of a door; entrance way into a house or a room.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Village in Late Summer 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, Village in Late Summer, in Cornhuskers (1918), text of Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sandburg-cornhuskers/village-in-late-summer.html, id L29005.
Form and metre
Village in Late Summer is 6 lines in a single stanza. The metre is trochaic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 89%).
See other poems in trochaic 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 trochaic tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Lips half-willing in a doorway. | 8 | ··/˘··/· |
| Lips half-singing at a window. | 8 | ··/˘··/˘ |
| Eyes half-dreaming in the walls. | 7 | ··/˘··· |
| Feet half-dancing in a kitchen. | 8 | ··/˘··/˘ |
| Even the clocks half-yawn the hours | 9 | /˘·····/˘ |
| And the farmers make half-answers. | 8 | ··/˘··/˘ |
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.