Some lines are straightforward iambic metre: the line ‘And there the sun burns crimson bright’, for example, would be scanned as ‘And THERE the SUN burns CRIM-son BRIGHT’.īut others are more complicated: for instance, the line ‘Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black’ would be scanned as ‘Let us LEAVE this PLACE where the SMOKE blows BLACK’: that is, an anapaest, an iamb, another anapaest, and another iamb. Iambic metre is associated with the rhythms of ordinary English speech, so this lends the poem a conversational tone, while the anapaests render the rhythm more sprightly and lively than regular iambic metre would – and this is appropriate given the excitement and joy the poem conveys, concerning the other realm beyond the sidewalk. An iambic foot is a light stress followed by a heavy stress, as in ‘To COOL’, while an anapaest is two light stresses followed by a heavy stress, as in ‘from his FLIGHT’. The metre of ‘Where the Sidewalk Ends’ is a mixture of iambic and anapaestic feet. The poem rhymes: the first two stanzas rhyme abcccb (where ‘wind’ and ‘begins’ are taken to be rhymes in the first stanza), and the third stanza is essentially a shorter version of the form used in the first two stanzas, retaining only the final four lines and doing without the first two, and so rhyming aaab. The poem comprises three stanzas of six, six, and four lines respectively. The fact that children know how to reach this limit or threshold, and then to go beyond it into the magical world beyond, strongly suggests that the world Silverstein is hinting at is one of play, imagination, and freedom, which adults tend to lose once sight of once they get too used to sticking to the path, viewing the sidewalk as merely a means of getting from A to B. And if those chalk arrows also direct us somewhere, their gesturing is less a directive than a friendly tip, a wink to the reader that another way, and another world, exist just out of sight.

Where the sidewalk ends