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Introduction to the poet

Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois, on January 6, 1878. His parents, August and
Clara Johnson, had emigrated to America from the north of Sweden. After encountering several
August Johnsons in his job for the railroad, Sandburg's father renamed the family. The
Sandburgs were very poor; Carl left school at the age of thirteen to work odd jobs, from laying
bricks to dishwashing, to help support his family. At seventeen, he traveled west to Kansas as a
hobo. He then served eight months in Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American war. While
serving, Sandburg met a student at Lombard College, the small school located in Sandburg's
hometown. The young man convinced Sandburg to enroll in Lombard after his return from the
war.

Sandburg worked his way through school, where he attracted the attention of Professor Philip
Green Wright, who not only encouraged Sandburg's writing, but paid for the publication of his
first volume of poetry, a pamphlet called Reckless Ecstasy (1904). While Sandburg attended
Lombard for four years, he never received a diploma (he would later receive honorary degrees
from Lombard, Knox College, and Northwestern University). After college, Sandburg moved to
Milwaukee, where he worked as an advertising writer and a newspaper reporter. While there, he
met and married Lillian Steichen (whom he called Paula), sister of the photographer Edward
Steichen. A Socialist sympathizer at that point in his life, Sandburg then worked for the Social-
Democrat Party in Wisconsin and later acted as secretary to the first Socialist mayor of
Milwaukee from 1910 to 1912.

The Sandburgs soon moved to Chicago, where Carl became an editorial writer for the
Chicago Daily News. Harriet Monroe had just started Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, and began
publishing Sandburg's poems, encouraging him to continue writing in the free-verse, Whitman-
like style he had cultivated in college. Monroe liked the poems' homely speech, which
distinguished Sandburg from his predecessors. It was during this period that Sandburg was
recognized as a member of the Chicago literary renaissance, which included Ben Hecht,
Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and Edgar Lee Masters. He established his reputation
with Chicago Poems (1916), and then Cornhuskers (1918). Soon after the publication of these
volumes Sandburg wrote Smoke and Steel (1920), his first prolonged attempt to find beauty in
modern industrialism. With these three volumes, Sandburg became known for his free verse
poems that portrayed industrial America.

In the twenties, he started some of his most ambitious projects, including his study of Abraham
Lincoln. From childhood, Sandburg loved and admired the legacy of President Lincoln. For thirty
years he sought out and collected material, and gradually began the writing of the six-volume
definitive biography of the former president. The twenties also saw Sandburg's collections of
American folklore, the ballads in The American Songbag and The New American
Songbag (1950), and books for children. These later volumes contained pieces collected from
brief tours across America which Sandburg took each year, playing his banjo or guitar, singing
folk-songs, and reciting poems.

In the 1930s, Sandburg continued his celebration of America with Mary Lincoln, Wife and
Widow (1932), The People, Yes (1936), and the second part of his Lincoln biography, Abraham
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Lincoln: The War Years (1939), for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He received a
second Pulitzer Prize for his Complete Poems in 1950. His final volumes of verse were Harvest
Poems, 1910-1960 (1960) and Honey and Salt (1963). Carl Sandburg died in 1967.

I am the People, the Mob

by Carl Sandburg

I am the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass.

Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world's food and
clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me
and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons
and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing.
Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out
and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes
me work and give up what I have. And I forget.
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history
to remember. Then—I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the
lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year,
who played me for a fool—then there will be no speaker in all the
world say the name: "The People," with any fleck of a sneer in his
voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive then.

Brief Analysis

In Sandburg's poem I am the People, the Mob , Sandburg again pays tribute to the common
people of Chicago . In this poem, Sandburg makes a point of not individualizing each person,
but defines the blue-collar workers as a �mob� and a �mass.� Sandburg salutes the
workers by attributing everything great that has been made in the world to them. Sandburg
describes how the common people are the ones who actually do all the work and help the world.
He is discussing how it is not the architect who lays the bricks to build massive buildings, and it
is not the great leaders like Napoleon who won the entire battle. It is the mob, the common
people that execute these wonders. At the end of the poem, Sandburg seems to be upset that
these people do not receive any credit for the great work that they do. He dreams of the day
when the common people will be recognized for their work, and when they will be looked at in
the same way that the great people are for the wonders of this world. This poem is especially
applicable in the case of the fire. It is important to remember that although the mayor played the
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part of a leader, it was the people of Chicago who really led the recovery of the city. The
common people were those who volunteered for the committees and who helped erect shelter
houses for the people that lost their homes.

overview

I Am the People, the Mob” is known as one of Sandburg’s most blatantly socialist
poems.

It is often condemned by critics as socialist propaganda, with the intent of glorifying the
power of the people.

However, Sandburg’s poetry is not shallow and thoughtless like true propaganda;
instead, he is making a moving appeal to the people to recognize their true potential and
power.

Perspective

In “I Am the People, the Mob”, Sandburg combines the point of view of someone merely
observing the mob with the point of view of someone speaking as the mob itself.

While Sandburg speaks in first person as the mob, he does make observations about
the mob that only one detached from mob could observe:

I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes
to me and makes me work and give up what I have. And I forget.

While he is observing these tendencies, Sandburg is at the same time caught up in his
role as the mob itself:

Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me? I am the
workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes.

This combination of perspective allows Sandburg to stand in the position of a “socialist

intellectual who discerns and proclaims the spirit of the People” (Wienan)

Sandburg sympathizes with the mob while at the same time showing himself to be a part
of it.

Symbolism

Sandburg creates a brief metaphor to highlight what the people have withstood over the
years:

I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing. Terrible storms
pass over me.
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Of course, the seed ground and the prairie represent the people. The fact that the
prairie will stand for much plowing is Sandburg’s way of saying that the people have
been exploited over the years. The rich and affluent of the world exploit the people,
using them to make themselves richer and more affluent, and to fight their wars (storms)

Carrying on with the exploitation of the people, Sandburg states:

The Napoleons come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more
Napoleons and Lincolns.

Great leaders, such as Napoleon and Lincoln, often come from the masses. However,
when these people rise above their peers, they often end up just exploiting the people.
Napoleon and Lincoln both used the people to fight wars.

Sandburg is trying to point out that the people must take action themselves, rather than
trust individuals to do the right thing.

Message

After highlighting the importance of the people and how they have been exploited
throughout history, Sandburg exhorts the mob to assert themselves.

When I, the people, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the lessons of yesterday
and no longer forget who robbed me last year, who played me for a fool-then there will be no
speaker in all of the world say the name: “The People,” with any fleck of a sneer in his voice or
any far-off smile of derision.

Sandburg wants the masses to recognize the injustices they have suffered at the hands
of those in power, and then use their own might to right these wrongs, and fight for their
own rights.

Analysis and comments on I Am The People, The Mob by Carl Sandburg

In the poem of Carl Sandburg, he gave the reader a vivid picture of the
life of the common people- the working class that in spite of their efforts
for change the ruling minority is still in charge...but towards the end of
his poem he made a fair warning...wait and see! when the "mob" realizes
their power the ruling minority must step aside.

To me this is one of visualy imaged poem speakes about the life of

people.the discrimination in them,their sacrifices towards the society and
the metaphor combines to the "HUMAN FACE".Here this poem conveys us about
the great work done through the people.the poet also tries to include
great personalities who are role model for us

I used to read a great deal of books but now I surf the internet looking
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for really good blogs like this one to read. this was a good read thanks!

Ah, thank you. You have jogged me into acoitn and tomorrow I will set
aside all my other projects (Pomeranians girls in season for one) and sit
down to my next blog.

Sandburg is the "I", you are the "I", I am the "I". Everyone is the "I". If
you are a human being, you are the speaker.

I Am The People, The Mob

To me this poem is a call for the mass to view society and its history and
how the common man is many times exploited by higher entities, but the ills
of society continue each generation for people do not come together as
whole and learn from the past; thus creating this perpetual cycle that man
lives in

Carl Sandburg was the kind of person who actnoliged the people who worked
hard. He volunteered to fight in the Spanish American War and after he went
to Lombard College. His poems relate to his life. How he sees the world and
the people in it.

It's very apparent that Sandburg wasn't a large fan of rhyme or rhythm.
What he did use as a writing technique was the art of parallel structure.
This technique being the repetition of certain key phrases, such as, "I am
the people... I am the workingman... I am the audience..." (Sandburg), and
so forth. He also tended to include Abraham Lincoln in his works, of which
he was also an avid fan.

Carl Sandburg uses free verse to write this poem. In this poem he talks
about how the people are the reason people like Napoleon and Lincoln were
able to do all that they did. Even though people like them die the people
are still strong. He uses Lincoln because he loves to talk about Lincoln
in his poems. Whitman and Sandburg both write in free verse and like to
talk about Lincoln. He talks about how if it were not for the people that
nothing would ever get done. The people he is referring to are the middle
and lower class citizens.

In this poem, I Am The People, The Mob, Sandburg uses a metaphor to compare
the word "mob" to human race. Sandburg wrote "I am the workingman, the
inventor, the maker of the world's food and clothes" (Sandburg 4-5). He
wants people to understand that without all the hard work, People wouldn't
have food to feed themselves and clothes to wear. People wouldn't be where
they're at right now.
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Being from Swedish immigrant parents, Carl Sandburg could relate to the
working class America. For some time, he himself was a struggling worker,
shining shoes and even being a hobo. In "I Am The People, The Mob" Sandburg
stresses the importance of the working class people, those with low paying
jobs. "Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through
me?" (Sandburg) Carl Sandburg wants to make it obvious that without the
working class, no one would be where they are.

Through "I am the People, The mob", Carl Sandburg has victoriously
presented his firm belief in the justification for the average American
worker. This poem is a significant example of how Sandburg felt about
people's rights as a whole, and it thoroughly expresses what will come of
"The mob--the crowd--the mass"(Sandburg 1900) if it were to get disturbed.

Through "I am the People, The mob", Carl Sandburg has victoriously
presented his firm belief in the justification for the average American
worker. This poem is a significant example of how Sandburg felt about
people's rights as a whole, and it thoroughly expresses what will come of
"The mob--the crowd--the mass"(Sandburg 1900) if it were to get disturbed.

Carl Sandburg wrote a whole biography about Abraham Lincoln, and now he is
also mentioning Abe in this poem. The author was known as "a spokesperson
for the laborers of America" and this poem shows it; he is speaking for the
people of the world. He saw how life was on the less prosperous side and
showed that in his poetry. There is refrain in the first and last line of
the poem but otherwise it is mainly done in free verse.

In the poem "I Am The People, The Mob," Carl Sandburg talks about the mass
of the poeple. The people who make everything and witness everything in
history. Carl Sandburg was once a hobo so he saw first hand contrast
between rich and poor. He was also concerned with the plight of American
workers. Sandburg uses a metaphor to compare the mob to the poeple. We
learn history in school because historical events can reoccur. Sandburg
says that the people forget the past.

In "I Am The People, The Mob" Carl Sandburg wrote as the mob, that is all
of the people living in the world, to represent the transcendental idea of
oversoul. He wrote that the mob, the general public, forgets the past with
each new generation. Furthermore, he wrote that when, "the People, learn to
remember ... The mob--the crowd--the mass--will arrive then" (Sandburg
14-20). Through this statement the reader understands that remembering the
past will allow all people living in the world to think as one; in other
words oversoul will be achieved. For this reason, it is assumed that Carl
Sandburg wrote "I Am The People, The Mob" to convey the transcendental idea
of oversoul.

Carl Sandburg wrote of the common people around him since they are the
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people he could relate to the most. Sandburg displays the way that the
common man is viewed in society and he did so using the form “cataloging.”
The way how Sandburg uses cataloging is very similar to Walt Whitman’s
style in his poems, such as “I hear America Singing.” Both Sandburg and
Whitman also felt they needed to give something back to the working class
men that they worked besides during their days. Not only do both Sandburg
and Whitman share this but they also wrote about Abraham Lincoln. They used
their talents to portray how great they viewed man. Whitman was born sixty
years before Sandburg, which makes Sandburg a classic writer, and leaving
this poem another masterpiece in America’s history.

Carl Sandburg's poem of I Am The People, The Mob shows how the human race
lives, dies, breathes, grows, and changes only to forget what it was and
what it has done. This style of metaphorically referring to the human race
as one entity to symbolize what were are to the world and to each other.
This is shows that we may be great and do so much but over time no one will
remember it.

I believe that Carl Sandburg has a way of getting on a lower level and
feeling the people and their beliefs. He saw real people and showed them
for who they were.

I rather think he is referring more to events like mob uprisings, such as

the Haymarket Riots, or, considering the time frame, the Russian
revolution, where people took politics into their own hands, fought for
change, either won or lost, and then descended back into the faceless,
sheeplike mob.

From what I understand, I believe that it is portrayed that the earth is

the narrator and "spatter a few red drops for history to remember" could be
a volcano.

*************************************
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The Harbor

Passing through huddled and ugly walls

By doorways where women

Looked from their hunger-deep eyes,

Haunted with shadows of hunger-hands,

Out from the huddled and ugly walls,

I came sudden, at the city's edge,

On a blue burst of lake,

Long lake waves breaking under the sun

On a spray-flung curve of shore;

And a fluttering storm of gulls,

Masses of great gray wings

And flying white bellies

Veering and wheeling free in the open

********************************

Chicago

Hog Butcher for the World,Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,Player with Railroads and the Nation's
Freight Handler;Stormy, husky, brawling,City of the Big Shoulders:They tell me you are wicked
and I believe them, for Ihave seen your painted women under the gas lampsluring the farm
boys.

And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, itis true I have seen the gunman kill and go
free tokill again.

And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On thefaces of women and children I have seen
the marksof wanton hunger.

And having answered so I turn once more to those whosneer at this my city, and I give them
back the sneerand say to them:
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Come and show me another city with lifted head singingso proud to be alive and coarse and
strong and cunning.

Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job onjob, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid
against thelittle soft cities;Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunningas a savage
pitted against the wilderness,Bareheaded,Shoveling,Wrecking,Planning,Building, breaking,
rebuilding,

Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing withwhite teeth,

Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a youngman laughs,

Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who hasnever lost a battle,

Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse.and under his ribs the heart of the
people,Laughing!

Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter ofYouth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be
HogButcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player withRailroads and Freight Handler to the
Nation.

Chicago

In A Nutshell

Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) lead a quintessential American life. He was the child of Swedish
immigrants, and he grew up dirt poor in a small town in Illinois. At various points in his life, he
was a bricklayer, a railroad worker, a hobo, a solider in the Spanish-American War, a member
of the socialist political party, an ad man, a journalist, a poet, a biographer of Lincoln, and a goat
farmer. (No, we are not kidding about him being a goat farmer.)

Because of his crazy diverse careers, Sandburg had a pretty unique view of what it means to be
an American, and we see his love for the country that gave him all of his varied opportunities in
the poem "Chicago." In some ways, this poem is a love letter to the city (and by extension, the
good ol' USA) itself. It's a poem that acknowledges the bad along with the good, the horrific
along with the wondrous, the salacious along with the holy. Chicago has room for hobos and
poets alike, and this is what Sandburg loves about his city.

And Chicagoans and Americans love Sandburg right back. He was, and still is, one of the most
frequently-read and taught poets of the past one hundred years. He won three Pulitzer Prizes in
his lifetime (two for his poetry, and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln). And the
Sandburg love keeps on keeping on. Indie rock musician Sufjan Stevens recently immortalized
Sandburg on his album Come on Feel the Illinoise. In the title song to that album, Stevens
imagines that the ghost of Sandburg visits him in his sleep. They have some deep
conversations, and Sufjan asks Carl, "Are you writing from the heart, are you writing from the
heart?"

We think: most definitely yes.

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Why Should I Care?

America.

Got an opinion on it? Love it? Hate it? Live there? Can't wait to leave there?

Carl Sandburg's "Chicago" is one of those poems that tries to capture THE AMERICAN
EXPERIENCE. (Yes, those caps are necessary. Sandburg is very serious about this
AMERICAN EXPERIENCE). His vision of Chicago, and, as an extension, America, isn't all
sunshine and roses. In fact, in Sandburg's America, there are no sunshine or roses at all.
"Chicago" is about hog butchers and freight handlers, about dust and smoke and prostitutes and
railroads.

For Sandburg, the real America is this America—the crazy, industrializing city of Chicago, filled
to the brim with people, people, and more people, all working hard in that windy city. You may
love America, or you may have some mixed feelings about our fair nation, but either way, you've
got to acknowledge that this is one awesome poem. And it's awesome not because it paints a
beautiful picture, but because it exposes, and even revels in, the dirt, the coarseness, the brute
strength of the city. Sandburg shows us a Chicago, and an America, that we can all recognize.

Chicago Summary

The poem begins when the speaker addresses the city of Chicago with five short lines. He calls
Chicago a series of names—it's a "Hog Butcher" and a "Tool Maker" and a "Stacker of Wheat"
(and a bunch of other things too). The Chicago that the speaker personifies is burly and tough.

Then, in longer lines, the speaker describes the life of the city. A mysterious "they" tells the
speaker that Chicago is "wicked," "crooked," and "brutal," and the speaker agrees with all of
these judgments. He has seen prostitutes, killers, and starving families. But the speaker
responds to this "they" and pronounces Chicago is "so proud to be alive and coarse and strong
and cunning." It's a vibrant and dynamic city, and the speaker finds beauty in it, despite its dark
corners.

The speaker then describes Chicago again in a series of short lines. Chicago is constantly
"building, breaking, rebuilding." This is the life cycle of the city.

Then the speaker describes Chicago even further. The city almost becomes the very people
who inhabit it (freaky, right?). The city feels the pulse and the "the heart of the people."

In the last line of "Chicago," the speaker repeats the first few phrases of the poem. He once
again calls Chicago "Hog Butcher" and "Tool Maker," and he says that the city is proud to have
these names. Chicago, you rock, the poem says.
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Stanza 1 Summary

Lines 1-5

Hog Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

 The poem begins in a pretty intense way. The speakerpersonifies the city (gives it
human qualities) by describing it as a "Hog Butcher." Note that the speaker doesn't say
that Chicago "is a city where Hog Butchers live," or even "a city of Hog Butchers." He
just gets right to it, and calls the city a Hog Butcher, thus bringing Chicago to life. It's as if
the city itself lives and breathes (and butchers too).
 And notice that "Hog Butcher," as well as all the other names for the city, are capitalized,
as if they are titles (like "Doctor," or "Professor"). This has the effect of elevating these
seemingly-low titles. (Have you ever addressed a letter to "Hog Butcher Smith?" We
think not.) And this is a pretty violent way to begin the poem, don't you think? We might
expect a poem that glorifies a city to begin by celebrating its beauty, but Sandburg
doesn't whitewash anything for us. Chicago is a tough place where a lot of hogs are
butchered, thus the poem begins with swine and blood. Just deal with it, Sandburg says.
 Then the speaker goes on to describe other attributes of Chicago in a similar way. It's a
city known not just for butchering, but also for its harvesting of wheat, its industry, and its
importance to the cross-country railroads. (And Sandburg himself worked on the
railroads as a teenager.) Again, no beauteous skylines here. Chicago is a place for
laboring.
 Then the speaker describes the city to us with adjectives (instead of with occupations).
It's "Stormy, husking, brawling," a "City of the Big Shoulders." To say that this is a city of
big shoulders is to use synecdoche, using a part to describe a whole. In this case, the
speaker uses a very small part (a part of one person: the shoulders) to describe a whole
city. Still, this is a very evocative move (which may be why "The City of Big Shoulders"
remains a popular nickname for Chicago). We can imagine a broad, big-shouldered
person, domineering and assertive. By extension, we can relate that personality to the
city as a whole. Your personification-meter should really be flashing now. It sounds like
the speaker is telling us about a tough muscle-man now, even though he's still talking
about the city (which is filled with tough muscle-men).
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Stanza 2 Summary.

Lines 6-9

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the
gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and
go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have
seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them
back the sneer and say to them:

 Notice something about these lines? They're getting kind of long, aren't they? They're
starting to remind us of the poetry of Walt Whitman, the super-important nineteenth-
century American poet who was known for cataloging the vast variety of the American
experience. Sandburg is definitely channeling Whitman here, both in terms of his content
(America!) and his form (really long lines).
 So, in this stanza we're introduced to a mysterious "they." "They" seem to be, well, the
haters. "They" criticize Chicago a whole lot.
 Note that the speaker, lover of Chicago, doesn't disagree. In fact, he totally agrees with
these Chicago-haters. He says that yes, he's seen the prostitutes, and yes, he's seen
the murderers, and yes, he's seen the starving families.
 "They" sneer, but guess what? Our speaker sneers right back in their mugs (faces,
folks). We're imagining an angry mob of "they"s, yelling at the solitary speaker. Tellingly,
though, our speaker's not intimidated. He gives as good as he gets, which adds to the
tough-minded, independent Chicago-vibe that this poem is creating.

Lines 10-12

Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and
strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid
against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the
wilderness,

 Now, the speaker is yelling back. Yes, there are bad things about Chicago, he admits,
but there's also so much awesomeness about it. In these lines, he taunts the haters, and
asks them to name another city that's as energetic, strong, and cunning as Chicago is.
 Is your personification-meter flashing again? It should be; the speaker is describing
Chicago as if it is a person who sings, and is proud, alive, coarse, strong, and cunning.
 This personified Chicago sounds like a big, burly, tough dude who is full of joy and pride
in his accomplishments. Sounds like someone we'd like to meet, but not get in a dust-up
with.
 The speaker keeps personifying Chicago as a "a tall bold slugger set vivid against the
little soft cities." Compared to other smaller, less busy, less exciting "soft" cities, Chicago
looms bright.
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 Chicago is so vibrant and tough, that it's like a powerhouse baseball player
("slugger"), hitting homeruns out of the park.
 In the final line of this stanza, the speaker changes from personification to simile. Now,
Chicago is "fierce as a dog." His tongue is "lapping for action;" he's ready to attack. He's
"cunning as a savage" (hello, another simile!) and he's ready to fight his way through the
wilderness.
 All of this figurative language is designed to create a single impression: Chicago is an
intense, aggressive, joyful, tough, cunning, fierce place. The haters can hate all they
want, but the speaker rejoices in Chicago's vibrancy. He loves the good and the bad of
Chicago—the city is what it is, and the speaker won't ignore any of it.

Lines 13-17

Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,

 The speaker must not think that he's described Chicago in enough detail, so he gives us
a list of words that describe the city in a series of short lines.
 Once again, he personifies the city. And once again, the city is personified as a tough,
burly dude. This dude is toiling. It seems like he's building the city itself—without a hat,
even!
 What's cool about these lines is that they acknowledge that one does not just build a city
from the ground up, like you would a Lego city. Building a city is a constant cycle of
planning, tearing down, building up, breaking, and rebuilding. The life cycle of a city is
just that—a cycle.
 A note on form: the last stanza had those long lines, but this stanza has super short
ones. It's like the speaker is condensing all of his thoughts about Chicago as tightly as
he can. This is the essence of the city: building, breaking, and rebuilding—the work
expands and contracts. (For more on the form of this poem, check out "Form and
Meter.")

Lines 18-22

Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the
people,
Laughing!

 And, here's some more personification (no surprise there). The speaker imagines the
Chicago-man combo as laughing as he works (we assume the dust is from the building
site where all the wrecking and building is going down). Chicago is so personified at this
moment that he even has a body (or at least, glistening white teeth).
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 And as this Chicago laughs as if he were a young man (simile alert!). He laughs in the
face of destiny, as if he is an undefeated boxer in the ring. (Hello, another simile!
Sandburg sure does enjoy his figurative language).
 This fighter is also "ignorant." It's as if he simply doesn't think about things like destiny.
He's not a worrier, he's a doer. The poem suggests that this is a man of action, not
reflection.
 And just when we think we couldn't handle any more personification, Sandburg packs in
some more. Chicago brags and laughs and tells us that his body contains the pulse and
the heart of his people.
 This laughter isn't, like, funny ha-ha laugher. It's deeper than that. It's laughter that
comes from a place of deep joy and life. It's almost defiant, too, in the face of those
haters from the earlier lines. Sure, this may be a simple town, but it's one whose
inhabitants aren't afraid to roll up their sleeves, get to work, and find the enjoyment in
doing that.
 At this point in the poem, Chicago seems way more like a person than a place. The city
has actually turned into one of its inhabitants. Chicago is a strong, burly, vibrant, toiling
man, made up of strong, burly, vibrant, toiling men. What an awesome image, if we do
say so ourselves.
 And, just a note on form: lines 18 and 19 represent an anaphora, with their parallel line
beginnings ("Under the smoke" and "Under the terrible burden"). The anaphora makes
the poem feel like a list, like there's so much to say about the city that the speaker's
gotta condense it into list form. (For more on that stuff, click on over to "Form and
Meter.")

Line 23

Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog
Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

 In this last line of the poem, the speaker brings us back to the beginning of the poem.
The laughing city of Chicago embraces its identity, and takes joy in the amazing, violent,
fast-paced, powerful life (and life-cycle) of the city. The city isn't ashamed of its working-
class identity. It acknowledges and loves it.
 The speaker says that Chicago is proud to be what it is, and reminds us of its youthful,
joyful energy.
 The bottom line of this poem: Chicago rocks.
 15

Chicago Analysis

Symbols, Imagery, Wordplay

Form and Meter

Free Verse"Chicago" is written in free verse. It doesn't have a rhyme scheme or any sort of
regular meter, and it's not written in a recognizable form (like a sonnet or villanelle).Still, this
does...

Speaker
We don't know too much about the speaker—we don't even know the speaker's name or
gender—but we are darn sure of one thing: the speaker loves Chicago. Like, really loves it. The
speaker and Chi...

Setting
Surprise, surprise: "Chicago" is set… in Chicago. The entire poem is about this windy city,
which the speaker spends a whole lot of time personifying. By the end of the poem, it actually
seems th...

Sound Check
"Chicago" is a poem about a tough city, and it sounds like it's spoken by a tough guy as well.
Just read that first stanza out loud: it's filled with short, heavy-sounding words that thump,
thump,...

What's Up With the Title?

"Chicago" is a poem all about Chicago (no surprises there). The title is right on the nose. And
we mean this almost-kind-of-literally. It alerts us to the fact that the poem is not just about
Chica...

Calling Card
Chicago Lovin'Our main man Carl really loved Chicago. He titled his first collection of poems
Chicago Poems, and filled that baby full of poems about Chicago (including our poem du jour,
"Chicago")...
 16

Tough-o-Meter
(2) Sea Level"Chicago" isn't too tough to read. There are no fancy turns of phrases or overly-
complicated references in this one. And that's kind of the point. Chicago is a place for everyone:
work...

Trivia
High School, Schmigh-School Sandburg didn't go to high school, but he did go to college.
(Source.) Sandburg's brother-in-law was the influential photographer Edward Steichen.
(Source)In his later y...

Steaminess Rating
PGThe poem does tell us that there are "painted women" (i.e., prostitutes) hanging around
Chicago. But it doesn't get more explicit than that, so this reference will probably fly for most
folks.

******************************

Robert Lowell: Biographical Note

Robert Traill Spence Lowell was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 1 March 1917. His father,
also Robert Traill Spence Lowell, was an officer in the United States Navy. Lowell's mother,
Charlotte Winslow Lowell, descended from an old New England family. Lowell was educated at
private schools in Boston and, for two years, at St. Mark's preparatory school. Even during his
youth, and certainly by the time he studied at St. Mark's, Lowell had decided upon a career as a
poet. He spent summers reading and studying the English literary tradition, imposing his reading
lists on friends from school. Upon graduation from St. Mark's, he attended Harvard (as men in
his family had done for generations). After two years at Harvard, however, Lowell left. His
departure was precipitated by his meeting, in 1937, with Allen Tate, a poet of the Fugitive group
and a practitioner of the not-yet-institutionalized "New Criticism." Lowell and Tate immediately
took to one another and Lowell traveled to Tate's Tennessee home during the summer of 1937;
he camped out in Tate's yard, writing poetry and studying at the feet of the older poet. Instead of
returning to Harvard that fall, Lowell transferred to Kenyon College, in Ohio, to study with John
Crowe Ransom, Tate's mentor. At Kenyon, Lowell befriended Randall Jarrell and Peter Taylor,
both of whom went on to their own successful careers as writers.

Lowell graduated summa cum laude in Classics from Kenyon in 1940. He spent the next year
studying with Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren at Louisiana State University. Before
departing for Louisiana, Lowell married Jean Stafford, a writer of short stories and novels. 1940
also saw Lowell's conversion to Roman Catholicism, a repudiation of his ancestors' New
England Protestantism as well as a dedication to what seemed to him the more authentic faith
of the Roman Church. After a year at Louisiana State, Lowell and Stafford moved to Monteagle,
Tennessee, where they shared a house with Allen Tate and his wife, the writer Caroline Gordon.
 17

When the Second World War began in 1941, Lowell had volunteered for military service. His
poor eyesight led to his initial rejection from armed service. In 1943, however, Lowell received a
conscription notice from the United States military. Shocked and dismayed by the Allied
firebombing of civilians in German cities like Dresden, he declared himself at this time a
conscientious objector. He served for several months in jail (his experiences form the basis of
"Memories of West Street and Lepke"), and finished his sentence performing community service
in Connecticut. During these months, he finished and published his first book, Land of
Unlikeness. During the next year he revised the book and published the new version as Lord
Weary's Castle in 1946. This book found a warm critical reception, sparked in part by Jarrell's
appreciative review in The Nation, and it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1947.
Lowell's reputation as a leading poet of the new generation was consolidated.

In 1948, Lowell and Stafford divorced and in 1949 Lowell married Elizabeth Hardwick, a young
writer from Kentucky who was already moving with ease among the New York community of
writers and intellectuals. In 1950, Lowell's father died after a long illness. Lowell published his
next book, The Mills of the Kavanaughs, in 1951. The book was roundly criticized as inferior
to Lord Weary's Castle, and even Lowell recognized the stiffness of the new book's dramatic
monologues. He and Hardwick spent the next several years living largely in Europe, especially
in Italy. These years saw Lowell suffering from a number of mental breakdowns, episodes of the
manic-depressive disease that plagued him throughout his life. After his mother's death in 1954,
Lowell was hospitalized at McLean's, a mental hospital in Massachusetts. During the years of
suffering and sickness and despair of the middle 1950s, years also characterized by a political
atmosphere Lowell depressing (the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower, a key moment for this
political culture, is the subject of "Inauguration Day: January, 1953"). One source of poetic
rejuvenation, though, was William Carlos Williams, whose work Lowell reviewed positively and
whose example of looser poetic forms influenced Lowell to write himself out of the strictness of
structure that characterizes the poems of Lord Weary's Castle. At the same time, Lowell was
urged by his psychiatrists to write about his childhood; these writings led finally to "91 Revere
Street," the prose memoir at the heart of Lowell's 1959 book, Life Studies, as well as to the
autobiographical poems of that book's "Life Studies" section. Beginning with "Skunk Hour," a
poem Lowell wrote in 1957 in answer to Elizabeth Bishop's "The Armadillo," Lowell brought
something of Williams' prosodic relaxation (a very controlled relaxation,though, nothing like the
formlessness of some subsequent free verse) to consideration of himself, his psyche, and his
surroundings. The publication of Life Studies in 1959 renewed Lowell's reputation; the book
received the National Book Award in 1960. Though some readers, like Allen Tate, intensely
disliked the new poems and found them both formally slack and personally embarrassing, many
readers saw in the book nothing less than a shift in the American poetic landscape. Along with
W.D. Snodgrass' Heart's Needle, published just before Life Studies, Lowell's new book
inaugurated the poetry that came to be called, in M.L. Rosenthal's coinage, "Confessional."

During the early 1960s, Lowell was energetically involved not only in poetic but also in political
efforts. He befriended Robert Kennedy and Jaqueline Kennedy, as well as Senator Eugene
McCarthy. He addressed, in such poems as "For the Union Dead," the dreadful possibility of
humanity's nuclear annihilation and the miserable culture that endured and endorsed that
possibility. "For the Union Dead," commissioned for and first read at the Boston Arts Festival in
1960, became the title poem of Lowell's next collection of his own poems (For the Union Dead,
1964). The early sixties, though, found Lowell also publishing his collection of Imitations, loose
translations of poems by Rilke, Rimbaud, and others (the book won the Bollingen Poetry
 18

Translation Prize in 1962), and working on the plays that would, in 1965, be published and
performed as The Old Glory, a trilogy based on works by Herman Melville and Nathaniel
Hawthorne.

The historical interest evident in Lowell's poetry and plays alike during the middle 1960s
translated into a political activism of sorts. Invited to a White House Arts Festival in 1965, Lowell
publicly refused Lyndon Johnson's invitation as a statement of his disagreement with American
escalation of the war in Vietnam. In October, 1967, Lowell went further still, participating along
with thousands of others in the March on the Pentagon (this March is the subject of "The March
I" and "The March II"). In 1967, Lowell published Near the Ocean, a collection of lyrics more
formal than the work he had produced since Life Studies, and he saw his translation of
Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound produced at Yale (the play was published two years later). But
the work in which Lowell was most deeply immersed during that year was the verse journal
published the next year asNotebook, 1967-68. In poems whose form is loosely based on the
sonnet (each is fourteen lines, roughly iambic pentameter, though most are unrhymed), Lowell
recorded his reactions to contemporary events in the world as well as his thoughts on American
history and his family. The book clearly aspires to something like Ezra Pound's "poem including
history," and has moments of stunning success, though some of the poems seem overly
constrained by the form Lowell has chosen and by the pressure to keep producing poems
quickly. Notebook is the basis for the three books Lowell published at the same time in
1973: History, which includes some of the public-issue poems of the earlier book as well as a
number of new poems, For Lizzie and Harriet, which includes some of the poems about his wife
and daughter from Notebook and many new poems documenting the break-up of his marriage
with Hardwick, and The Dolphin, which includes a number of poems about his marriage with
Caroline Blackwood (they married in 1972). The Dolphin won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974.

Lowell spent much of his last years in England with Caroline Blackwood and the couple's son.
He was, however, on his way to see Hardwick in New York when he died of a heart attack on 12
September 1977. His last book, Day By Day, appeared in the year of his death.

Michael Thurston

History

History has to live with what was here,

clutching and close to fumbling all we had--
it is so dull and gruesome how we die,
unlike writing, life never finishes.
Abel was finished; death is not remote,
a flash-in-the-pan electrifies the skeptic,
his cows crowding like skulls against high-voltage wire,
his baby crying all night like a new machine.
As in our Bibles, white-faced, predatory,
the beautiful, mist-drunken hunter's moon ascends--
a child could give it a face: two holes, two holes,
my eyes, my mouth, between them a skull's no-nose--
O there's a terrifying innocence in my face
drenched with the silver salvage of the mornfrost.
 19

Robert Lowell

Reading Myself

by Robert Lowell

Like thousands, I took pride and more than just,

struck matches that brought my blood to a boil;
I memorized the tricks to set the river on fire—
Somehow never wrote something to go back to.
Can I suppose I am finished with wax flowers
And have earned my grass on the minor slopes of Parnassus. . .
No honeycomb is built without a bee
adding circle to circle, cell to cell,
the wax and honey of a mausoleum—
this round dome proves its maker is alive;
the corpse of the insect lives embalmed in honey,
prays that its perishable work lives long
enough for the sweet-tooth bear to desecrate—
this open book . . . my coffin.

Summary of the poem

“Reading Myself” is an introspective poem about Robert Lowell’s writing described through the
larger metaphor of a beehive. I interpreted the poem as the honeycomb being a metaphor for a
poem and the bee a metaphor for the poet. The bee adds “circle to circle, cell to cell” just at the
poet adds lines and stanzas in order to create the final honeycomb or poem.

When the author states that the “corpse of the insect lives embalmed in honey” it is an allusion
to how a bee’s soul and life is manifested in his work just as the soul of a poet is manifested in
his poems. It is a beautiful and intricate metaphor, much like a honeycomb or a poem. The fact
that he relates it to a mausoleum puts the beehive on a grander, more intricate scale and
underlines how much work bees put into creating their hive and honey (or a poet into creating
his poem).
The allusion to Parnassus, or Mount Parnassus, as it is the home of poetry and literature,
underscores the author’s ability to produce poetry. It is an interesting allusion as it is one to
Greek mythology in a poem that seems primarily centered on a beehive.

He states that he has “earned my grass on the minor slopes of Parnassus…” or that his poems
are worthy to be read on the streets as others have before him. He questions whether he can
suppose, however, that he is “finished with wax flowers” and has indeed “earned my grass.” I
liked this visual of the poet leaving behind the flowers of the novice and taking his place on the
grass of Mount Parnassus a master. The shift in thought reflects the overall shift in the poem as
he moves from Parnassus to the honeycomb metaphor. The poem has no rhyme but a definite
rhythm created by alliteration, such as “circle to circle, cell to cell,” and enjambment.
 20

As the bee “prays that its perishable work live long/enough for the sweet-tooth bear to
desecrate” so a poet hopes that his poetry will remain. The two things, made up of so much of
the makers, will be torn apart by others. This was by far my favorite line as it is easy to imagine
a bear with a sweet tooth coming and eating the honeycomb without a second thought. It
presents a nice image within an already intricate metaphor. Overall the poem resonates with the
reader because we have all created something and felt like it was the best thing we had ever
created, knowing over time it will be destroyed. To some extent, however, it must have been
good to have warranted destruction. A bear only destroys a beehive for the sweet honey
goodness that resides inside.

****************************

The Public Garden,

by Robert Lowell
Burnished, burned-out, still burning as the year
you lead me to our stamping ground.
The city and its cruising cars surround
the Public Garden. All's alive—
the children crowding home from school at five,
punting a football in the bricky air,
the sailors and their pick-ups under trees
with Latin labels. And the jaded flock
of swanboats paddles to its dock.
The park is drying.
Dead leaves thicken to a ball
inside the basin of a fountain, where
the heads of four stone lions stare
and suck on empty fawcets. Night
deepens. From the arched bridge, we see
the shedding park-bound mallards, how they keep
circling and diving in the lanternlight,
searching for something hidden in the muck.
And now the moon, earth's friend, that cared so much
for us, and cared so little, comes again—
always a stranger! As we walk,
it lies like chalk
over the waters. Everything's aground.
Remember summer? Bubbles filled
the fountain, and we splashed. We drowned
in Eden, while Jehovah's grass-green lyre
was rustling all about us in the leaves
that gurgled by us, turning upside down...
The fountain's failing waters flash around
the garden. Nothing catches fire.
 21

In the Public Garden

by Marianne Moore

Summary
Moore wrote “In the Public Garden” for the 1958 Boston Arts Festival, where she read the poem
to an audience of five thousand people. In it, she considers art both in its public function and as
an expression of individuality. To emphasize the importance of artistic freedom, she arranges
her ideas in a series of paradoxes.
The first stanza introduces the duality. The festival “for all” takes place near Harvard University,
which has made “education individual.” Moore considers one individual, an “almost scriptural”
taxicab driver who drove her to Cambridge. He wisely remarks: “They/ make some fine young
men at Harvard.” This comment suggests the beauties of the landscape, but Moore disrupts the
reader’s expectation by going backward from summer to spring to winter. She notes the
weathervane with gold ball glittering atop Boston’s Faneuil Hall in summer. Spring brings pear
blossoms, pin-oak leaves, and iris. Winter, instead of death or hibernation, exhibits snowdrops
“that smell like/ violets.”
Moore next moves inside King’s Chapel to contemplate gratitude. She quotes a traditional
southern hymn about work as praise of God. A chapel and a festival are alike; they both involve
an exchange. The festival-goer expects to get art or inspiration in exchange for pay or attention.
Instead, Moore cites some unexpected givings: black sturgeon eggs, a camel, and, even more
unusual, silence. Silence is as precious as freedom....

****************************************

William Carlos Williams

In 1883, William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey. He began writing poetry
while a student at Horace Mann High School, at which time he made the decision to become
both a writer and a doctor. He received his MD from the University of Pennsylvania, where he
met and befriended Ezra Pound.

Pound became a great influence on his writing, and in 1913 arranged for the London publication
of Williams's second collection, The Tempers. Returning to Rutherford, where he sustained his
medical practice throughout his life, Williams began publishing in small magazines and
embarked on a prolific career as a poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright.

Following Pound, he was one of the principal poets of the Imagist movement, though as time
went on, he began to increasingly disagree with the values put forth in the work of Pound and
especially Eliot, who he felt were too attached to European culture and traditions. Continuing to
experiment with new techniques of meter and lineation, Williams sought to invent an entirely
fresh—and singularly American—poetic, whose subject matter was centered on the everyday
circumstances of life and the lives of common people.

His influence as a poet spread slowly during the twenties and thirties, overshadowed, he felt, by
 22

the immense popularity of Eliot's "The Waste Land"; however, his work received increasing
attention in the 1950s and 1960s as younger poets, including Allen Ginsberg and the Beats,
were impressed by the accessibility of his language and his openness as a mentor. His major
works include Kora in Hell (1920), Spring and All (1923), Pictures from Brueghel and Other
Poems (1962), the five-volume epic Paterson (1963, 1992), and Imaginations (1970).

Williams's health began to decline after a heart attack in 1948 and a series of strokes, but he
continued writing up until his death in New Jersey in 1963.

The Widow's Lament in Springtime

In A Nutshell

For all the sorrow it contains, "The Widow's Lament in Springtime" is no weepy plea for pity.
Not even close. Our speaker, who is by all means grief stricken from the loss of her husband, is
composed, even distant. The poem may cover a wide gulf of complicated emotion, but it does
so plainly, with a no-nonsense attitude. It sounds just like we might imagine a friend or a
neighbor would sound, trying to communicate his or her emotions after a great loss.

William Carlos Williams was a big fan of making poems local and contemporary. He wanted his
pieces to sound like they were written in the very time and place they were describing. Williams
believed the essence of poetry was change; it must constantly be reinvented. Williams wanted
to strip away what he saw as ornamental (check out his early poem "Tract" for more on that)
and to make a poetry that is immediate, local, and vital.

To be sure, "The Widow's Lament in Springtime," published in 1921, deals with some very
traditional, even stodgy poetic themes: loss and death, the seasons, and man's relation to the
natural world. Yet, despite this, and even though we know it's a poem, this piece is so
beautifully condensed, and so honest, that it somehow doesn't really feel that much like a poem,
does it?

The chatty tone, the plainness of speech, the absence of rhyme and meter, all these help lend
the widow a realness. To put it simply, the artsy-fartsy poetry parts don't get in the way. Williams
lets the emotions speak for themselves. In fact, he lets the widow speak for herself, so let's give
her a listen, shall we?

Why Should I Care?

Granted, most of you reading this are probably not elderly widows. You probably haven't even
been married, much less lost a spouse of thirty-five years. Thirty-five years! For those of us who
haven't even been alive that long, how can we possibly relate? We should probably pack up our
bags and move on to the next poem, right?
 23

Unless, of course, you think experiences of grief and loss might be a part of every person's
life, no matter your age. You know, the more we think about it, we feel that what this William
Carlos Williamspoem deals with – the way a huge change or loss can transform our life
experience – is actually incredibly relevant and engaging. Think of the difficulty of waking up in
the same bed, gazing out at the same spring flowers you've looked at all your life, but with your
family (or a significant part of it) suddenly gone. Think of how you might now see those things
that used to give you joy.

Plus, if a man in his late thirties can manage to write a poem from the perspective of a widow,
we figure we can muster the imagination to relate. Not that it takes much work to be moved by
this poem. It breaks our hearts, but in the best way possible. The way that art often does.

The Widow’s Lament in Springtime

BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

Sorrow is my own yard

where the new grass

flames as it has flamed

often before, but not

with the cold fire

that closes round me this year.

Thirty-five years

I lived with my husband.

The plum tree is white today

with masses of flowers.

Masses of flowers

load the cherry branches

and color some bushes

yellow and some red,

but the grief in my heart

is stronger than they,

for though they were my joy

formerly, today I notice them

and turn away forgetting.

 24

Today my son told me

that in the meadows,

at the edge of the heavy woods

in the distance, he saw

trees of white flowers.

I feel that I would like

to go there

and fall into those flowers

and sink into the marsh near them.

The Widow's Lament in Springtime Summary

Our speaker, a widow, compares her sorrow to her yard, making note of how the new growth of
spring seems different at this point in her life – colder and isolating. She mentions how long she
lived with her husband, then quickly changes the subject to her description of the flowers on the
plum tree, the cherry tree, and the bushes in her yard. The bright colors of the flowers, she tells
us, are not as strong as the grief she feels. She no longer takes joy in them. Then she mentions
that her son told her about a place out in the meadows, where there were trees with white
flowers. She declares that she would like to go out there and sink into the marsh

Lines 1-6 Summary

Line 1

Sorrow is my own yard

 Our speaker drops a metaphor bomb on us poor readers. To her, sorrow is her yard.
Her yard is sorrow. The two things are one and the same.
 A yard is generally something that we cultivate and take care of; we mow it, we rake the
leaves, we probably water it, and try to protect it from harm. It also surrounds us (at least
when we're home).
 All of which makes it a strange, and very sad, image to connect with sorrow, of all things.
Who wants to be surrounded by sorrow? Who wants to step out the backdoor and into
sorrow?
 Of course the title warns us we won't be dealing with the most uplifting of poems, but the
opening line is blunt nonetheless.
 Notice how possessive she is of the sorrow. Not just "my," but "my own."
 Given that we know this is a "Widow's Lament," we can guess that this is going to be a
persona poem. This means that though the poem is written by William Carlos Williams, it
is not written in his voice. Nope, he has taken on the voice of a woman – a widow – and
the poem will contain her words.
 25

Lines 2-4

where the new grass

flames as it has flamed
often before but not

 In these lines, the widow gives us some imagery to describe her yard. She imagines the
new grass as flames.
 This could just be a fancy, poetic way of describing sprouting grass. After all, when new
grass sprouts up, it does kind of look like a green flame has spread across the yard, like
wildfire.
 But the image also gives an ominous feel, as if her yard is on the attack.
 "New grass" calls our attention back to the word "Springtime" in the title. Spring and new
growth bring with them ideas of renewal, rebirth, and so on. We're still waiting to see
how those ideas will fit in with the sadness in the title and in these opening lines. But we
can say that her spring doesn't exactly seem full of joy and rebirth.
 The seasonal nature of the grass is also emphasized by "as it has flamed / often before."
It's a cycle, something that repeats every time the snow melts and the sun comes out.
 Flames and fire are also pretty widely used as symbols for desire, particularly romantic
desire, so we'll keep that info in our back pockets in case it comes in handy.

Lines 5-6

with the cold fire

that closes round me this year.

 This year, the growth of the grass doesn't hold any warmth or pleasure for our speaker.
Some spring.
 The coldness of the fire seems to tell us that something is definitely not right here. Fire
should be hot, right?
 So even though the grass is growing, just like every other spring, something has
changed. Remember, she has lost her husband, so maybe the fact that he's not around
to share this spring with her has changed the way she sees it. Even fire doesn't seem
warm with him gone.
 Our speaker seems to feel distant from the new growth, the renewal in the natural world,
and yet she feels oppressed by this distance and coldness – it "closes round" her.

Lines 7-10 Summary

Lines 7-8

Thirty-five years
I lived with my husband.

 Now we've got some concrete information. Phew. Our speaker lived thirty-five years with
the husband she has just lost.
 Shmoopers, that is a long time. No wonder she's sad.
 26

 This line is the final confirmation that the speaker of this poem is indeed the "Widow"
from the title. The loss of her husband is the reason she's so unhappy, the reason spring
holds no warmth and joy.
 Even the way our speaker delivers this little detail is heartbreaking. On the surface it's a
simple statement of fact. But we know there is a lot of complicated emotion behind it.
When you live with someone you love for thirty-five years, well, it's probably pretty hard
to let them go, to say the very least.

Lines 9-10

The plum tree is white today

with masses of flowers.

 Our speaker now describes a plum tree in bloom with white flowers, adding to the
pattern of natural imagery that we've seen so far in the poem.
 The way she says "the" plum tree makes us think the tree is probably also in her yard.
 A tree in bloom is generally an image of abundance, brightness, and liveliness, right?
But because of our speaker's state of mind, with the loss of her husband and that
coldness she now feels, the liveliness is not so much invigorating as it is sad.
 And what about that word "masses"? There's a weight to it, right? As if the flowers on the
tree are weighing the tree down. Or as if all this beauty is actually weighing her down.
She's too sad to appreciate the warmth and life and color of spring.

Lines 11-19 Summary

Lines 11-12

Masses of flowers
load the cherry branches

 Now she describes the cherry tree, which is also in bloom.

 There's that word "masses" again, and the repetition is important to note. The beauty of
the flowers is being compared to a burden, and the sense of it weighing her down is
made even more powerful with the word "load."
 Who knew flowers could be so heavy?
 Of course, we have to ask, is it really the flowers that are heavy? Or do they just seem
heavy because something else, like, say, her grief, is heavy, too?
 Whatever the case, there is clearly a connection between the way this widow sees the
natural world around her (mainly in her yard), and the way she feels emotionally about
the death of her husband.
 Which makes sense, if you think about it. When we experience loss, it tends to change
the way we see the world around us, right? Just as when we experience joy, everything
around us seems just a little bit shinier.
 27

Lines 13-14

and color some bushes

yellow and some red

 Flowers, flowers everywhere! There are blooms on the bushes in the yard as well, some
yellow and some red. Gosh, these colors are even more vibrant than the bright white of
the plum blossoms.
 She seems to be making note of the power that flowers have to color or transform things
– in this case the bushes in her yard.
 It's spring, the time of transformation. What can this tell us about her inner state? We'll
just have to keep reading to find out.

Lines 15-16

but the grief in my heart

is stronger than they

 After such beautiful flower imagery, these lines give us the Big But. As it turns out, the
force of the grief she feels is greater than the brightness and renewal of the flowers.
 You see, she notices the transformational nature of the flowers, but it doesn't quite work
on her anymore. Her inner grief is just too powerful.
 Now that her husband is dead, she both mourns his loss and the loss of spring, which no
longer seems quite as beautiful as it once did.

Line 17

for though they were my joy

 These flowers used to be her joy, and why shouldn't they have been? They sound
downright gorgeous. Thismetaphor, which is given to us in the past tense, shows us just
how much has changed.
 Flowers, and by extension all the color and renewal of nature during spring, used to give
her great pleasure. Maybe she was a gardener. Maybe she and her husband used to
enjoy gazing at the flowers out their window.
 In any case, none of this is true anymore. All the joy she used to find in those flowers is
gone, which makes her current state all the sadder.
 The flowers are still there – they haven't changed – but the widow can't find pleasure in
them, and the loss of that pleasure parallels the loss of her husband. It seems her grief
is all consuming.

Lines 18-19

formerly, today I notice them

and turn away forgetting.

 Now she's not moved by the flowers; she turns away from them and forgets them.
 28

 She really seems to be emphasizing how things have changed. Her experience was
one way before, and now it's very different.
 "Forgetting" is an interesting word choice, don't you think? We assume it means that
the flowers are now so unimportant to her that she forgets them right away.
 Or maybe she's referring to the fact that she has forgotten what they used to mean to
her.
 At any rate, it also reminds us of all the things she cannot forget: the memories of her
husband; his absence; all the thoughts that weigh on her now, and that have spoiled her
relationship with the natural world.

Lines 20-24 Summary

.Line 20

Today my son told me

 Big Moment Alert! Our speaker's son told her something (which we'll get to in a
moment), but what's really pivotal here is the entrance of the son in the first place.
 The appearance of the son here is a big shift. We've been so focused on our lonely
speaker, and the loss of her husband, that it's almost shocking to learn she has a son
around to talk to.
 We don't know whether they talked on the phone, or are actually in the same place, but
still that contact should be a reason for joy, right?
 And yet, the tone stays pretty level. The entrance of the son doesn't make any
noticeable impact on the slow, sad pace of the language. It feels like just another fact
thrown into the (flower) pot.

Lines 21-22

that in the meadows,

at the edge of the heavy woods

 Her son is describing the location of something in the meadows at the edge of the woods
(we haven't gotten to what yet).
 And what about those woods? Well, for one thing, they're "heavy." That heaviness is
everywhere in this poem.
 Perhaps the woods are dense? Or maybe she's just projecting again. The woods are
heavy because she's feeling the weight of her grief.
 Our speaker is being a bit coy, though. She just won't tell us exactly what she means.
Just like earlier in the poem, our speaker is keeping the focus on the natural world. She
mentions her son (as, earlier, she mentioned her husband), but immediately zooms right
in on an image of the natural world.
 This means that when we read the poem, we have to decode her descriptions of the
world around her, to see what they tell us about her inner world. And wouldn't you know
it? That's what we've been doing all along.
 29

Lines 23-24

in the distance, he saw

trees of white flowers.

 Near those heavy woods (which we now learn are far off in the distance), the speaker's
son saw trees with white flowers, growing in the meadow.
 Hmm. That sounds familiar, doesn't it? Could these be more plum trees, growing by the
woods?

Lines 25-28 Summary

Lines 25-26

I feel that I would like

to go there

 Our speaker wants to go to the place her son described. Hey, we wouldn't mind a visit
either. It sounds lovely, and it's not that strange to want to go somewhere that someone
has described to you.
 But it is perhaps a little strange that she wants to go here, given that her description of
this place sounds rather similar to her description of her own yard (the heaviness, the
trees with white flowers).
 She's feeling pretty uninspired by her own place, yet is open to this other one?
 It's also worth noting that this is one of the few places in the poem where the widow tells
us how she feels. She doesn't say, "I would like." No, instead she says, "I feel that I
would like." She seems a bit unsure of herself, doesn't she? She's somehow distant from
her own desires.

Line 27

and fall into those flowers

 On the most basic level, this line tells us that the widow would like to fall into the flowers
out in this place her son told her about.
 Doesn't she have flowers (white ones even!) on her plum tree right there in the yard?
Why does she want to go all the way out to the meadow? Why do these flowers draw
her more than the ones that are a few steps away?
 And what is it about them that makes her want to fall into them?

Line 28

and sink into the marsh near them.

 Apparently our widow doesn't just want to fall into those flowers. She also wants to sink
into the nearby marsh.
 Hey, maybe she just likes to paddle around in marshes. Maybe it makes her feel better.
 30

 But we can't deny that there's a definite suggestion of suicide here. Especially with
that word "sink." Marshes, after all, are filled with water. So we have to ask: does she
want to drown?
 When we think about it, a suicidal desire, sadly, doesn't seem out of left field. It's a pretty
heavy and all-encompassing sorrow that our speaker has been expressing throughout
this piece. Her husband is dead. She's pretty much all alone in the world.
 Still, if we wanted to put a positive spin on it, we might say that maybe sinking into the
marsh is her way of reuniting with the world she has become detached from.
 She used to find joy in the natural world. Now she doesn't. But by sinking into that
marsh, maybe, just maybe, she would be reunited with the natural world she has lost.
 Unfortunately, as with much of the poem, our widow-speaker doesn't come right out and
tell us what she means.
 Even at the point where she longs for death (possibly), she's still pretty reserved. This is
not a woman who relishes share-time.
 Whew. What an ending, right? Talk about haunting.

The Widow's Lament in Springtime Analysis

Symbols, Imagery, Wordplay

Form and Meter

Free VerseGo ahead. We dare you to spot a rhyme. How about meter – is there any of that?
Nope. There's none of that fancy stuff here. "The Widow's Lament in Springtime" is free verse at
its frees...

Speaker
Despite the fact that our poet is very much a man, our speaker is very much a woman, and a
widow at that. Although we don't know much about her specifically, we can totally picture the
scene: a lon...

Setting
We'd call this poem an interior poem. And not just in the sense that it takes place inside our
speaker's mind, in the realm of her emotions. But also because our speaker, from the way she
describes...
 31

Sound Check
The Sound of SilenceThis poem is all about silence. Look at those skinny lines, and all that
white space they leave on the right side of the page. Listen to the way the poem takes a
sentence like t...

What's Up With the Title?

We've got a widow. And she's lamenting. Oh, and it's springtime. Consider the scene set. Let's
start with those first three words: "The Widow's Lament." By saying "The Widow" the title
already give...

Calling Card
Skinny LinesYou probably noticed (and we already pointed out) that this poem has some pretty
short lines. And while certainly not every Williams poem has short lines, it's something that he
has com...

Tough-o-Meter
(3) Base Camp There are some deep connections here, but the poem, beginning with the title,
is not too shy about making them clear.

Trivia
"The Widow's Lament in Springtime" is a tribute to Williams's mother. Uh, gee, thanks, son?
(Source.)Williams's paternal grandmother was named Emily Dickinson. Nope, not that Emily
Dickinson. It's...

Steaminess Rating
GThis poor widow is all alone in the house, so there's no sex here, awesome readers.

***********************************

The young housewife

At ten AM the young housewife

moves about in negligee behind
the wooden walls of her husband’s house.
I pass solitary in my car.

Then again she comes to the curb

to call the ice-man, fish-man, and stands
 32

shy, uncorseted, tucking in

stray ends of hair, and I compare her
to a fallen leaf.

The noiseless wheels of my car

rush with a crackling sound over
dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling.

Summary of the poem

The first three lines of Williams’ poem are concrete and specific. We begin this poem at 10 am
in the morning with a “young housewife.” Then, in lines 2 and 3 we find she is “behind/the
wooden walls of her husband’s house.” We are not given much, be we are still able to make
intelligent inferences about the character of this poem. Just by calling her a “young housewife”
we know that she is bound to marriage, and her freedom is limited. Because she is depicted as
“behind/wooden walls” we are hemmed in with her. The woman is trapped by walls of a house
that is not even hers to own. Williams removes possession of the house and gives the
ownership to her husband, and we sense that the she is without any authority. As for the
physical aspects of the woman, we only know that she is moving “about in negligee…” The word
“negligee” is usually used as a noun, but Williams turns it into more of a state of being. He does
not state that she “moves about in a negligee” because if he had done that, he would have only
defined the clothes the woman was wearing, opposed to this more kinetic description of her
movements.

So far, the tone in these three lines has been one of constriction and a small hint at sexuality;
the later originating from the situation: a young, bored woman in a negligee wandering about in
her backyard. The last line of the stanza introduces a drastic change: the first-person narrator
passes by “solitarily” in his car. The way Williams has devised the sentence structure, keeps this
detail until the end, and when we discover it, we are shocked. We now feel that the narrator has
been watching this woman, because it is the narrator who has been describing the scene to us.
If this poem had been in third-person we would have felt that the passing by is more of a
coincidence, but with the introduction of the “I” we are apprehensive of the narrator. As readers,
we have moved from an initial feeling of constriction, to suspicion toward the narrator and his
motives.

The next stanza begins with “Then again…” And this seems like a signal to a new incident,
different from the one in the first stanza. We find that she is still confined to the house, as she
“comes up to the curb.” After that, she begins to calls on to “ice-man” and the “fish-man” and
then “stands/ shy, uncorseted…” We now have a different image of this woman. We find that
she is testing her boundaries, and gives out slightly sexual hints. The way she “stands/shy,
uncorseted tucking in…” is our hint to this. The juxtaposition of “shy” and “uncorseted” gives us
a vivid mental picture of the nature of this woman. She is there on the curb trying to act
innocent, but she is carefully giving out sexual suggestions. The line break here at “tucking in”
makes us want to know, immediately, what she is tucking in. We follow the line to the next line
and discover it is a “stray end of hair.” This is a completely innocent movement, but the way
Williams chooses to reveal it to us, makes us anticipate each line with more enthusiasm.
 33

The line breaks in lines 8 and 9 also keep us anticipating. The statement “I compare her/”
makes us wonder what will he compare her to. This is the first time we are brought back to the
narrator since his sudden involvement in live 4. We follow line 8 into 9 and discover that he
compares her “to a fallen leaf.” This is the only comparison in the entire poem, and it appears
weak. I was expecting something more liberating, something that made her more attractive for
him. But after considering what words are associated with a “fallen leaf” it makes more sense.
Words like alone, separated, and fragile. I think the narrator sees her as these things. The
sound of the phrase “fallen leaf” is soft. There isn’t a harsh consonant in the phrase, and it starts
and ends on the same soft “f” sound. This softens the tone of the narrator, and he is not as
alarming as he was in the first stanza.

The tone in these last few lines is comparable to the first stanza. We still feel slightly repressed,
and the narrator is still watching this woman from what seems to be a distance. In this stanza,
however, the woman is trying to push her boundaries, by going up to the curb and calling to
other men with sly hints at sexuality. With this last stanza, we are wondering if the man will
make an advancement on the woman, and the atmosphere is one of curiosity and anxiousness.

In this last stanza, Williams gives us a sort of oxymoron with “The noiseless wheels of my
car/rush with a crackling sound over/” The “noiseless wheels” seems to clash with “a crackling
sound” and we are wondering why this is. We are also still waiting for the resolution between the
housewife and the narrator. Because of the “noiseless wheels” we know that the man is still in
the car, but the “crackling sound” is throwing us off, and it is in the last stanza where we
discover the man’s true intentions. The poems states that the narrator “bow[s] and pass[es]
smiling.” At first, this makes as much sense as the “fallen leaf” comparison. It is difficult to bow
in a car, and we are still wondering about the “crackling sound over/dried leaves.” It is also a
strange way to end this poem. It is almost disappointing, because we were ready for a stronger
resolution. The best explanation, in light of this light-hearted ending, is that the narrator is
imagining himself bowing and smiling at the woman. Now, we get the image of a man walking
by the house were she lives and how he steps quietly on dried leaves, and her looking up at
him. Then, he bows, gentlemanly, and gives her a smile and goes on his way. I think this makes
more sense, especially with the comparison in the second stanza. He sees her as a lonely, but
completely innocent, woman who is being neglected by her husband. He doesn’t feel that he
should impose on her though. If he had, he would have imagined him doing something more
drastic than just politely bowing and smiling at her.

This poem is simplistic, but its message is more subtle and complex than it appears to be.
Because of the way Williams plays with his sentence structure, he can have fun with the
narrator. He doesn’t introduce him until the end of the first stanza, and the way he adds him at
the end of the stanza, makes him appear out of place and strangely distant. His comparison of
her to a “fallen leaf” makes him less strange, and in the last stanza he seems to fit into the poem
naturally, even though he is still distant from the woman.

*********************

Biography of Wallace stevens

 34

Wallace Steven

Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on October 2, 1879. He attended Harvard
University as an undergraduate from 1897 to 1900. He planned to travel to Paris as a writer, but
after a working briefly as a reporter for the New York Herald Times, he decided to study law. He
graduated with a degree from New York Law School in 1903 and was admitted to the U.S. Bar
in 1904. He practised law in New York City until 1916.

Though he had serious determination to become a successful lawyer, Stevens had several
friends among the New York writers and painters in Greenwich Village, including the
poets William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and E. E. Cummings.

In 1914, under the pseudonym "Peter Parasol," he sent a group of poems under the title
"Phases" to Harriet Monroe for a war poem competition for Poetry magazine. Stevens did not
win the prize, but was published by Monroe in November of that year.

Stevens moved to Connecticut in 1916, having found employment at the Hartford Accident and
Indemnity Co., of which he became vice president in 1934. He had begun to establish an
identity for himself outside the world of law and business, however, and his first book of
poems, Harmonium, published in 1923, exhibited the influence of both the English
Romantics and the French symbolists, an inclination to aesthetic philosophy, and a wholly
original style and sensibility: exotic, whimsical, infused with the light and color of an
Impressionist painting.

For the next several years, Stevens focused on his business life. He began to publish new
poems in 1930, however, and in the following year, Knopf published an second edition
of Harmonium, which included fourteen new poems and left out three of the decidedly weaker
ones.

More than any other modern poet, Stevens was concerned with the transformative power of the
imagination. Composing poems on his way to and from the office and in the evenings, Stevens
continued to spend his days behind a desk at the office, and led a quiet, uneventful life.

Though now considered one of the major American poets of the century, he did not receive
widespread recognition until the publication of his Collected Poems, just a year before his death.
His major works include Ideas of Order (1935), The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937), Notes
Towards a Supreme Fiction (1942), and a collection of essays on poetry, The Necessary
Angel (1951).

Stevens died in Hartford in 1955.

Poetry

Harmonium (1923)
Ideas of Order (1935)
 35

Owl's Clover (1936)

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction (1942)
Parts of a World (1942)
Esthétique du Mal (1945)
Three Academic Pieces (1947)
Transport to Summer (1947)
Primitive Like an Orb (1948)
Auroras of Autumn (1950)
Collected Poems (1954)
Opus Posthumous (1957)
The Palm at the End of the Mind (1967)

Prose

The Necessary Angel (1951)

Plays

Three Travellers Watch the Sunrise (1916)

Carlos Among the Candles (1917)

Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself

At the earliest ending of winter,

In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,

A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,

No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism

Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from the outside.

That scrawny cry--It was

A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,

Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
 36

Wallace Stevens

Summary of the poem

The title, “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself” suggests to the reader that this poem
examines the concept of reality vs. illusion. Throughout this poem the author struggles to
discover reality among the products of his imagination. For example, the author toys with the
idea that the bird call he heard was imagined by his restless mind. He knows he has heard the
call before on such a morning however, he cannot determine if the call of the bird is a real thing
or only an illusion of circumstance. This idea of shadows and illusions versus life’s true forms is
a similar theme among Plato’s Republic. The title itself reminded me immediately of Plato’s
Allegory of the Cave. In this allegory Socrates struggles to convey to his listeners that most
people are like prisoners chained to the confines of a cave and forced to watch the world’s
actions through the shadows reflected on the cave wall. Without ever knowing the truth of the
world above, the prisoners will believe that the shadows are real living forms. The character in
this poem is similar to the prisoners since he cannot distinguish between what is real and what
is only an illusion within his mind. According to the allegory, the prisoners can become
enlightened if they are released from the cave and allowed to climb into the light of the world
above. Like the character within Wallace’s poem, the climb from illusion to reality is a slow
difficult process however, once adjusted to the world’s true forms they will be able to see the
sun, the object which sheds light on all truth. Similarly, Wallace employs the sun in his poem as
it rises in the sky to shed light across the land. It symbolizes the truth and reality of the world
both in Wallace’s poem and Plato’s Cave Allegory. As a result, I believe that Wallace employs
the poem to demonstrate a real life situation examining the ideas in Plato’s Republic. Everyday
we are forced to distinguish between life’s true forms and those which are only shadows on the
cave wall. Wallace recognizes the importance and significance of Plato’s ideas and in doing so
challenges his readers to further explore the depths of our minds for sources of truth. Through
this quest for truth we can follow in Plato’s footsteps to achieve absolute knowledge.

******************************

Biography of Poet

Joy Harjo was born in 1951 in Tulsa, Oklahoma to Native American and Canadian ancestry.
Strongly influenced by her Muskogee Creek heritage, feminist and social concerns, and her
background in the arts, Harjo frequently incorporates Native American myths, symbols, and
values into her writing. Her poetry tends to emphasize the Southwest landscape and need for
remembrance and transcendence. She once commented, “I feel strongly that I have a
responsibility to all the sources that I am: to all past and future ancestors, to my home country,
to all places that I touch down on and that are myself, to all voices, all women, all of my tribe, all
people, all earth, and beyond that to all beginnings and endings. In a strange kind of sense
[writing] frees me to believe in myself, to be able to speak, to have voice, because I have to; it is
 37

my survival.” Harjo’s work is largely autobiographical, informed by her love of the natural
world and her preoccupation with survival and the limitations of language. A critically-acclaimed
poet, her many honors include the Josephine Miles Poetry Award, the William Carlos Williams
Award, and the American Indian Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Award. She has
received fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the National Endowment for the
Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation. In addition to writing poetry, Harjo is a noted teacher
and saxophonist, performing for many years with her band, Poetic Justice.

Her first volume of poetry was published in 1975 as a nine-poem chapbook titled The Last
Song. These early compositions, set in Oklahoma and New Mexico, reveal Harjo’s remarkable
power and insight into the fragmented history and world view of native peoples. Commenting on
the poem “3 AM” in World Literature Today, John Scarry wrote that it “is a work filled with ghosts
from the Native American past, figures seen operating in an alien culture that is itself a victim of
fragmentation…Here the Albuquerque airport is both modern America’s technology and moral
nature—and both clearly have failed. ”What Moon Drove Me to This? (1980), Harjo’s first full-
length volume of poetry, appeared four years later and includes the entirety of The Last
Song. The book continues to blend everyday experiences with deep spiritual truths. In an
interview with Laura Coltelli in Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak,Harjo shared the
creative process behind her poetry: “I begin with the seed of an emotion, a place, and then
move from there….I no longer see the poem as an ending point, perhaps more the end of a
journey, an often long journey that can begin years earlier, say with the blur of the memory of
the sun on someone’s cheek, a certain smell, an ache, and will culminate years later in a poem,
sifted through a point, a lake in my heart through which language must come.”

That search for freedom and self-actualization is particularly noticeable in Harjo’s third book of
poetry, She Had Some Horses (1983). The book frequently incorporates prayer-chants and
animal imagery, achieving spiritually resonant effects. One of Harjo’s most frequently
anthologized poems, “She Had Some Horses,” describes the “horses” within a woman who
struggles to reconcile contradictory personal feelings and experiences to achieve a sense of
oneness. The poem concludes: “She had some horses she loved. / She had some horses she
hated. / These were the same horse.” As Scarry noted, “Harjo is clearly a highly political and
feminist Native American, but she is even more the poet of myth and the subconscious; her
images and landscapes owe as much to the vast stretches of our hidden mind as they do to her
native Southwest.” Indeed nature is central to Harjo’s work. In her prose poetry
collection Secrets from the Center of the World (1989), each poem is accompanied by a color
photograph of the Southwest landscape. Praising the volume in the Village Voice, Dan Bellm
wrote, “Secrets is a rather unlikely experiment that turned into a satisfying and beautiful
book…As Harjo notes, the pictures ‘emphasize the “not-separate” that is within and that moves
harmoniously upon the landscape.’“ Bellm added, “The book’s best poems enhance this play of
scale and perspective, suggesting in very few words the relationship between a human life and
millennial history.”

Harjo’s best-known volume, the multiaward-winning In Mad Love and War (1990), is more
overtly concerned with politics, tradition, remembrance, and the transformational aspects of
poetry. The first section, which relates various acts of violence, including the murder of an
Indian leader as well as attempts to deny Harjo her heritage, explores the difficulties many
Native Americans face in modern American society. The second half of the book frequently
emphasizes personal relationships and change. Leslie Ullman noted in the Kenyon Review, that
 38

“like a magician, Harjo draws power from overwhelming circumstance and emotion by
submitting to them, celebrating them, letting her voice and vision move in harmony with the
ultimate laws of paradox and continual change.” Praising the volume in the Prairie
Schooner,Kathleen West wrote, “In Mad Love and War has the power of beauty and prophecy
and all the hope of love poised at its passionate beginning. It allows us to enter the place ‘we
haven’t imagined’ and allows us to imagine what we will do when we are there.” The book won
an American Book Award and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award

Harjo followed In Mad Love and War with The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (1994),another
book of prose poetry. The title is based on an Iroquois myth about the descent of a female
creator. As Frank Allen noted in Library Journal, Harjo is concerned with the vying forces of
creation and destruction in contemporary society, embodied in such symbolism as wolves and
northern lights contrasted with alcoholism and the Vietnam War. Booklist reviewer Pat
Monaghan praised the poems as “stunning, mature, wholehearted, musical,” and the collection
together as a “brilliant, unforgettable book.” Harjo’s next collection, A Map to the Next World:
Poetry and Tales (2000), includes a long introduction and much commentary with the poems.
The collection continues Harjo’s project of reclaiming Native American experience as various,
multi-phonic, and distinct. Using myth, old tales and autobiography, Harjo both explores and
creates cultural memory through her illuminating looks into different worlds. As poet Adrienne
Rich said, “I turn and return to Harjo’s poetry for her breathtaking complex witness and for her
world-remaking language: precise, unsentimental, miraculous,” praise that seemed particularly
apt after the publication of How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, 1975-
2001 (2002). A Publishers Weekly reviewer declared that the poems “show the remarkable
progression of a writer determined to reconnect with her past and make sense of her present,
drawing together the brutalities of contemporary reservation life with the beauty and sensibility
of Native American culture and mythology.” Including previous work, How We Became Human,
according to Pam Kingsbury of the Library Journal, “explores the role of the artist in society, the
quest for love, the links among the arts, what constitutes family, and what it means to be
human. Using the chant/myth/storytelling forms of her ancestors, she draws the reader into the
awareness that ‘one people is related to another.’“ Harjo is currently writing a book of stories
that is half-memoir, half-fiction and working on a book project with Laguna Pueblo photographer
Lee Marmon.

Consistently praised for the depth and thematic concerns in her writings, Harjo has emerged as
a major figure in contemporary American poetry. While Harjo’s work is often set in the
Southwest, emphasizes the plight of the individual, and reflects Creek values, myths, and
beliefs, her oeuvre has universal relevance. Bellm asserted: “Harjo’s work draws from the river
of Native tradition, but it also swims freely in the currents of Anglo-American verse—feminist
poetry of personal/political resistance, deep-image poetry of the unconscious, ‘new-narrative’
explorations of story and rhythm in prose-poem form.” According to Field, “To read the poetry of
Joy Harjo is to hear the voice of the earth, to see the landscape of time and timelessness, and,
most important, to get a glimpse of people who struggle to understand, to know themselves, and
to survive.”

Harjo told Contemporary Authors: “I agree with Gide that most of what is created is beyond us,
is from that source of utter creation, the Creator, or God. We are technicians here on Earth, but
also co-creators. I’m still amazed. And I still say, after writing poetry for all this time, and now
music, that ultimately humans have a small hand in it. We serve it. We have to put ourselves in
 39

the way of it, and get out of the way of ourselves. And we have to hone our craft so that the
form in which we hold our poems, our songs in attracts the best.”

The Flood

It had been years since I’d seen the watermonster, the snake who lived at the bottom of the
lake. He had disappeared in the age of reason, as a mystery that never happened.

For in the muggy lake was the girl I could have been at sixteen, wrested from the torment of
exaggerated fools, one version anyway, though the story at the surface would say car accident,
or drowning while drinking, all of it eventually accidental.

This story is not an accident, nor is the existence of the watersnake in the memory of the people
as they carried the burden of the myth from Alabama to Oklahoma. Each reluctant step
pounded memory into the broken heart and no one will ever forget it.

When I walk the stairway of water into the abyss, I return as the wife of the watermonster, in a
blanket of time decorated with swatches of cloth and feathers from our favorite clothes.

The stories of the battles of the watersnake are forever ongoing, and those stories soaked into
my blood since infancy like deer gravy, so how could I resist the watersnake, who appeared as
the most handsome man in the tribe, or any band whose visits I’d been witness to since
childhood?

This had been going on for centuries: the first time he appeared I carried my baby sister on my
back as I went to get water. She laughed at a woodpecker flitting like a small sun above us and
before I could deter the symbol we were in it.

My body was already on fire with the explosion of womanhood as if I were flint, hot stone, and
when he stepped out of the water he was the first myth I had ever seen uncovered. I had
surprised him in a human moment. I looked aside but I could not discount what I had seen.

My baby sister’s cry pinched reality, the woodpecker a warning of a disjuncture in the brimming
sky, and then a man who was not a man but a myth.

What I had seen there were no words for except in the sacred language of the most holy
recounting, so when I ran back to the village, drenched in salt, how could I explain the water jar
left empty by the river to my mother who deciphered my burning lips as shame?

My imagination swallowed me like a mica sky, but I had seen the watermonster in the fight of
lightning storms, breaking trees, stirring up killing winds, and had lost my favorite brother to a
spear of the sacred flame, so certainly I would know my beloved if he were hidden in the
blushing skin of the suddenly vulnerable.
 40

I was taken with a fever and nothing cured it until I dreamed my fiery body dipped in the river
where it fed into the lake. My father carried me as if I were newborn, as if he were presenting
me once more to the world, and when he dipped me I was quenched, pronounced healed.

My parents immediately made plans to marry me to an important man who was years older but
would provide me with everything I needed to survive in this world, a world I could no longer
perceive, as I had been blinded with a ring of water when I was most in need of a drink by a
snake who was not a snake, and how did he know my absolute secrets, those created at the
brink of acquired language?

When I disappeared it was in a storm that destroyed the houses of my relatives; my baby sister
was found sucking on her hand in the crook of an oak. And though it may have appeared
otherwise, I did not go willingly. That night I had seen my face strung on the shell belt of my
ancestors, and I was standing next to a man who could not look me in the eye.

The oldest woman in the tribe wanted to remember me as a symbol in the story of a girl who
disobeyed, who gave in to her desires before marriage and was destroyed by the monster
disguised as the seductive warrior.

Others saw the car I was driving as it drove into the lake early one morning, the time the carriers
of tradition wake up, before the sun or the approach of woodpeckers, and found the emptied six-
pack on the sandy shores of the lake.

The power of the victim is a power that will always be reckoned with, one way or the other.
When the proverbial sixteen-year-old woman walked down to the lake within her were all
sixteen-year-old women who had questioned their power from time immemorial.

Her imagination was larger than the small frame house at the north edge of town, with the
broken cars surrounding it like a necklace of futility, larger than the town itself leaning into the
lake. Nothing could stop it, just as no one could stop the bearing-down-thunderheads as they
gathered overhead in the war of opposites.

Years later when she walked out of the lake and headed for town, no one recognized her, or
themselves, in the drench of fire and rain. The watersnake was a story no one told anymore.
They’d entered the drought that no one recognized as drought, the convenience store a signal
of temporary amnesia.

I had gone out to get bread, eggs and the newspaper before breakfast and hurried the cashier
for my change as the crazy woman walked in, for I could not see myself as I had abandoned her
some twenty years ago in a blue windbreaker at the edge of the man-made lake as everyone
dove naked and drunk off the sheer cliff, as if we had nothing to live for, not then or ever.

It was beginning to rain in Oklahoma, the rain that would flood the world.
 41

The Flood Joy Harjo

Sometimes classified as a short story, the prose poem “The Flood” weaves the Native American
myth of the watersnake with the tragic story of a contemporary sixteen-year-old Creek girl. The
legend underlying Harjo's story recounts the tale of a water monster who takes the form of a
handsome warrior and seduces a young woman. Leaving her family, the girl becomes his wife
and lives with him at the bottom of the lake. The modern Creek girl also meets a man by the
lake and is seduced by him. However, she imagines that her lover “was not a man, but a myth”
and believes that she has participated in a sacred ritual. The girl's parents are embarrassed by
her actions, and, to cover their shame, they arrange her marriage to an older man of the tribe.
The girl rejects the marriage.

Eventually, the girl disappears in a tornado, but later it is learned that she died not from the
storm but by drowning. Older tribal members believe that the watersnake punished the girl for
disobeying her parents. Others believe that the girl accidentally drowned when she drove her
car into the lake after consuming a six-pack of beer. The narrator offers a third opinion—that the
girl's depressing life on the reservation clashed with her Native American heritage. The cultural
conflict led her to commit suicide.

Harjo believes that keeping tribal oral traditions alive is vital to the survival of Native American
people. Ignoring the sacred myths risks the destruction of American Indian culture. The people
in the story have lost their connection with the natural world by adopting the values of modern
Western society. Ironically, the watersnake, the ancient god of wind and rain, has the last word.
As the title of the story implies, cultural disintegration will result if the power of nature is not
respected.

*********************** 1
In China,
even the peasants
named their first daughters
Jade―
the stone that in the far fields
could moisten the dry season,
could make men move mountains
for the healing green of the inner hills
glistening like slices of winter melon.
And the daughters were grateful:
They never left home.
To move freely was a luxury
stolen from them at birth.
Instead, they gathered patience;
learning to walk in shoes
the size of teacups,
without breaking―
the arc of their movements
as dormant as the rooted willow,
as redundant as the farmyard hens.
But they traveled far
 42

in surviving,
learning to stretch the family rice,
to quiet the demons,
the noisy stomachs.

2
There is a sister
across the ocean,
who relinquished her name,
diluting jade green
with the blue of the Pacific.
Rising with a tide of locusts,
she swarmed with others
to inundate another shore.
In America,
there are many roads
and women can stride along with men.
But in another wilderness,
the possibilities,
the loneliness,
can strangulate like jungle vines.
The meager provisions and sentiments
of once belonging―
fermented roots, Mah-Jong tiles and firecrackers―set but
a flimsy household
in a forest of nightless cities.
A giant snake rattles above,
spewing black clouds into your kitchen.
Dough-faced landlords
slip in and out of your keyholes,
making claims you don't understand,
tapping into your communication systems
of laundry lines and restaurant chains.
You find you need China:
your one fragile identification,
a jade link
handcuffed to your wrist.
You remember your mother
who walked for centuries,
footless―
and like her,
you have left no footprints,
but only because
there is an ocean in between,
the unremitting space of your rebellion.
 43

Introduction to poet

“Lost Sister” was published in 1983 in Cathy Song’s first volume of poems, Picture Bride. Her
book earned the Yale Younger Poets Award for 1983, as well as a nomination for a National
Book Critics Circle Award. Poet Richard Hugo, the Yale Award judge, praised Picture Bride for
its “candor and generosity,” and he specifically cited “Lost Sister” as an example of the way
“Song does not shrink from the hard realities of the societal and familial traps set for women.” In
this poem, neither the daughter who stays home in China, nor the sister who leaves for the
United States has found freedom. By employing images of movement and stasis, and by
exploring the customs of naming and foot binding, Song attends to the Chinese woman’s
struggle for identity, whether at home or on “another shore.” The poem is a cameo of the
struggles women in many parts of the world face in negotiating freedom and power.

Born and raised in Hawaii, Cathy Song has returned there as an adult to live and write. Thus,
most of the poems inPicture Bride tell family stories that grow out of the islands’ rich soil. Some,
such as “Lost Sister,” reach back and across to more distant, but no less powerful stories about
Song’s Chinese and Korean ancestors. Because of this, the textures and tales of the book
reach far beyond family history and beyond Hawaii. In choosing Song’s book, Richard Hugo
recognized its ability to express, through Hawaii’s many cultures, the stories of anyone who has
struggled to survive and adapt in a new land. Picture Bride is a polyphony of

voices—Korean, Chinese, Japanese—that might otherwise be silent. In particular, “Lost Sister”

tells the story of women who, like Cathy Song’s Chinese grandmother, face the paradoxes of
freedom and belonging.

Author Biography
Cathy Song was born on August 20, 1955, in Honolulu, Oahu, Hawaii, to a Chinese-American
mother and a Korean-American father. Song spent her early childhood in the small town of
Wahiawa, which, like many other rural Hawaiian communities, made its livelihood raising sugar
and pineapples for export. The title poem of Picture Bridespeculates what the experience of
immigrating to Hawaii must have been like for Song’s Korean grandmother. It imagines her
feelings upon first looking into “the face of the stranger / who was her husband,” the man who
had been waiting for her, picture in hand, “in the camp outside / Waialua Sugar Mill.” In “Easter:
Wahiawa, 1959,” Song connects her memory of gathering Easter eggs as a four-year-old with
the image of her Korean grandfather’s hard-earned find of “a quail egg or two” along the
riverbank as a young child, eggs that “would gleam from the mud / like gigantic pearls.”

Song began the writing life as a young student in the middle-class suburbs of Honolulu and
continued at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she was mentored by poet John
Unterecker. She finished her undergraduate studies at Wellesley College in 1977 and went on
to earn an M.F.A. in creative writing in 1981 from Boston University. In 1987 she and her
husband, Douglas Davenport, moved back to Honolulu, where they and their three children now
live. Her second volume, Frameless Windows, Squares of Light, was published in 1988, and her
most recent volume, School Figures, appeared in 1994. Besides winning the prestigious Yale
Younger Poets Award, Song has also won the Shelley Memorial Award and, in 1994, the Hawaii
Award for Literature.
 44

In recent years, Song has taught creative writing for the Poets in the Schools program in
Hawaii and at several universities. Since the publication of School Figures, Song has been
concentrating on her own writing, supported in part by an NEA Poetry Fellowship, and has a
manuscript for another volume of poetry forthcoming. She is a member of Bamboo Ridge, a
group of Hawaiian poets and fiction writers. In 1991, the Bamboo Ridge Press published Sister
Stew, an anthology edited by Song and Juliet Kono featuring the fiction and poetry of
contemporary Hawaiian women.

Lines 1-4
In the first lines of part one, the speaker of the poem takes the reader immediately to the
homeland of Song’s maternal grandmother and introduces a Chinese naming custom that will
be reflected and refracted throughout the poem. First daughters throughout China, “even the
peasants,” are often named “Jade,” a precious stone recognized not only for its beauty but for
its magical healing powers.

Lines 5-9
Here the speaker describes the powers of jade, using rural, natural, and agricultural images that
will be contrasted in part two with menacing images of urban life. The jade stones and, by
association, the young women so named are believed to bring life and healing to their
homeland. Song’s skillful use of color imagery can be seen here in the juxtaposition of the
luminous green jade with the daughter-blessed, greening landscape of China, those “inner hills /
glistening like slices of winter melon.” Song’s musical repetition of sounds and words in the lines
“could moisten the dry season / could make men move mountains” also implies a kind of
pastoral grace and power in the lives of these daughters. The image of “far fields” where the
stones work their magic suggests not only the vast stretches of farmland in the China of Song’s
ancestry, but also begins the poem’s melancholy play upon traveling “far,” whether at home or
abroad. It is a theme established in earlier poems in Picture Bride—in images of long walks,
long bus rides, journeys into the forests of lilikoi vines, and journeys across the ocean.

Lines 10-20
The speaker next tells us “the daughters were grateful,” ostensibly to have such a beautiful
name and to occupy such an important place in the family. Consequentially, “they never left
home.” But there are other reasons for their stasis that cast an ironic light on such gratitude.
Subtly but suddenly, the reader discovers in the next lines that the freedom to leave home was
“stolen” from the beginning. The harsh reality Song introduces in these lines is the centuries-old
custom of foot binding.

From the end of the T’ang dynasty in the eleventh century a.d. until as recently as the 1920s,
Chinese women, initially of the upper class, were required to begin binding their feet around five
years of age in order to make them tiny and “feminine.” Using three tightly wound yards of cloth,
the binding procedure distorted the natural flexion and shape of the foot by forcibly bending the
toes under the metatarsal area of the foot—sometimes even breaking the bones—and tightly
drawing the entire upper foot toward the heel, leaving the big toe free to serve as the delicate
point of the “lotus petal.

Comment

(The first part of the poem discusses the confinements of women peasants in China. They were
restricted from leaving home and were unable to enjoy the luxury of moving freely. Because of
 45

this, women became patient and had to learn to survive by becoming the caretakers of
men.The second part of the poem describes a rebellious Chinese woman who has moved from
China to America despite her family’s rules and traditions. In America, she finds that women
have more freedom and can move freely.However, through all the possibilities in America, she
comes to realize she is lonely and has almost nowhere to go. She realizes she needs her roots
and her country.)