Analysis of Mamie
Carl Sandburg 1878 (Galesburg) – 1967 (Flat Rock)
Mamie beat her head against the bars of a little Indiana town and dreamed of romance and big things off somewhere the way the railroad trains all ran.
She could see the smoke of the engines get lost down where the streaks of steel flashed in the sun and when the newspapers came in on the morning mail she knew there was a big Chicago far off, where all the trains ran.
She got tired of the barber shop boys and the post office chatter and the church gossip and the old pieces the band played on the Fourth of July and Decoration Day
And sobbed at her fate and beat her head against the bars and was going to kill herself
When the thought came to her that if she was going to die she might as well die struggling for a clutch of romance among the streets of Chicago.
She has a job now at six dollars a week in the basement of the Boston Store
And even now she beats her head against the bars in the same old way and wonders if there is a bigger place the railroads run to from Chicago where maybe there is
romance
and big things
and real dreams
that never go smash.
Scheme | AABCDEFGHIJ |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 1010101011010010101101011110101111 111011010111101111001010101010101111101011111011 1110101011001101000110001100111011100101 011010101010101101101 10111011111011111111001011010101101 11011111001001010101 010111010101001110101110101011110111011 01 011 011 11011 |
Characters | 1,071 |
Words | 214 |
Sentences | 5 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 11 |
Lines Amount | 11 |
Letters per line (avg) | 77 |
Words per line (avg) | 19 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 849 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 212 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on May 03, 2023
- 1:04 min read
- 257 Views
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"Mamie" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 4 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/4707/mamie>.
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