Analysis of 'Boes
Carl Sandburg 1878 (Galesburg) – 1967 (Flat Rock)
I waited today for a freight train to pass.
Cattle cars with steers butting their horns against the
bars, went by.
And a half a dozen hoboes stood on bumpers between
cars.
Well, the cattle are respectable, I thought.
Every steer has its transportation paid for by the farmer
sending it to market,
While the hoboes are law-breakers in riding a railroad
train without a ticket.
It reminded me of ten days I spent in the Allegheny
County jail in Pittsburgh.
I got ten days even though I was a veteran of the
Spanish-American war.
Cooped in the same cell with me was an old man, a
bricklayer and a booze-fighter.
But it just happened he, too, was a veteran soldier, and
he had fought to preserve the Union and free the
niggers.
We were three in all, the other being a Lithuanian who
got drunk on pay day at the steel works and got to
fighting a policeman;
All the clothes he had was a shirt, pants and shoes--
somebody got his hat and coat and what money he
had left over when he got drunk.
Scheme | ABCDEFGHIHJKBLBGMBNOOPQJR |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Tetractys (24%) |
Metre | 11001101111 101111011010 111 00101010111001 1 10101010011 100111010111010 101110 1010111001001 101010 101011111100010 101010 111110111010010 1001001 100111111110 1000110 111101110100100 111101010010 10 1010101010001001 111111011011 100010 10111101101 101110101101 11101111 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,035 |
Words | 189 |
Sentences | 11 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 25 |
Lines Amount | 25 |
Letters per line (avg) | 31 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 774 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 187 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 56 sec read
- 110 Views
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"'Boes" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 29 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/4626/%27boes>.
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