Carl Sandburg: "Muckers"

                   MUCKERS

 Twenty men stand watching the muckers.
       Stabbing the sides of the ditch
       Where clay gleams yellow,
       Driving the blades of their shovels
       Deeper and deeper for the new gas mains, 
      Wiping sweat off their faces
                 With red bandanas.

The muckers work on  . . .  pausing  . . .  to pull
Their boots out of suckholes where they slosh.

    Of the twenty looking on
Ten murmur, "O, it's a hell of a job,"
Ten others,  "Jesus, I wish I had the job."  

-- Carl Sandburg --
Complete Poems 


Two groups of ten and while they stand next to each other, they occupy different worlds, or so it seems to Carl Sandburg.   It reminds me of that saying attributed to a Native American:  Condemn no one until you have walked a mile in that person's shoes.  As I look back, I see too many times when I forgot this.

This is a very physical  poem: ditch, clay, stabbing, blades, shovels, sweat, boots in suckholes, slosh, red bandanas.  .  ..

Carl Sandburg: "The Mist"

THE MIST

I am the mist, the impalpable mist,
Back of the thing you seek.
My arms are long,
Long as the reach of time and space.

Some toil and toil, believing,
Looking now and then on my face,
Catching an olden, vital glory.

But no one passes me,
I tangle and snare them all.
I am the cause of the Sphinx,
The voiceless, baffled, patient Sphinx.

I was at the first of things,
I will be at the last.
          I am the primal mist
          And no man passes me;
          My long impalpable arms
          Bar them all.

-- Carl Sandburg --
The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg
 

My first thought was that the mist was death, but that second stanza makes me wonder.  I find this an unusual poem for Sandburg, or at least unusual in that the few poems I've read of his seem to focus more on the physical world.   This has much more of a mystical or metaphysical theme, or at least more than I have encountered in the few poems that I have read by him.

Carl Sandburg: "From the Shore"

Here's one from Carl Sandburg that caught my eye as I was browsing through a collection of his poetry.


From the Shore

A lone grey bird,
Dim-dipping, far-flying,
Alone in the shadows and grandeurs and tumults
Of night and the sea
And the stars and storms.

Out over the darkness it wavers and hovers,
Out into the gloom it swings and batters,
Out into the wind and the rain and the vast,
Out into the pit of a great black world,
Where fogs are at battle, sky-driven, sea-blown,
Love of mist and rapture of flight,
Glories of chance and hazards of death
On its eager and palpitant wings.

Out into the deep of the great dark world,
Beyond the long borders where foam and drift
Of the sundering waves are lost and gone
On the tides that plunge and rear and  crumble.
-- Carl Sandburg --
The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg


I have always envied birds for they live in three dimensions while I'm trapped in two.  Yes, I know about airplanes, but I am a fearful-flyer, a control problem, I suspect.  But I never really considered very deeply just what it means to be able to fly and just what it is like, especially during those times when there are no soft winds and a blue sky and a safe landing below--at least, that is, until I read Sandburg's poem. 

The use of alliteration and the hyphenated adjectives reminds me of some Old English poems that I have read, Beowulf being one and others--"The Seafarer" for example.  This is a brief quotation and one appropriate I think:

All I ever heard along the ice-way
was sounding sea, the gannet's shanty
whooper and curlew calls and mewling gull
were all my gaming, mead and mirth
At tempest-tested granite crags
the ice-winged tern would taunt
spray-feathered ospreys overhead
would soar and scream.  .  .
 -- Anon  --
Online translation of "The Seafarer" by Charles Harrison-Wallace.




And, of course, there's always a haiku that strikes a similar note.

Grey marsh, black cloud.  .  .
Flapping away in autumn
Last old slow heron
-- Anon --
A Little Treasury of Haiku
Trans. Peter Beilenson



I read somewhere (wish I could remember who said this) that a poem should make you see something new or see something old in a new way.  I think Sandburg has succeeded here.

Has he succeeded with you?   

Carl Sandburg: Southern Pacific, a poem

Southern Pacific

"Huntington sleeps in a house six feet long.
 Huntington dreams of railroads he has built and owned.
 Huntington dreams of ten thousand men saying: Yes, sir.

 Blithery sleeps in a house six feet long.
 Blithery dreams of rails and ties he laid.
 Blithery dreams of saying to Huntington: Yes, sir.

 Huntington,
 Blithery sleep in houses six feet long."

 -- Carl Sandburg --
 from Harvest Poems


It's a common enough point, but one that can't be made too often.  Thomas Gray made it also:

"Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,

 Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;

 Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile,

 The short and simple annals of the poor.

 The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,

 And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,

 Awaits alike the inevitable hour.

 The paths of glory lead but to the grave. 

 

-- Thomas Gray --

from "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"

Death is the great leveler

Carl Sandburg: Happiness

                               Happiness

I asked professors who teach the meaning of life to tell me
     what is happiness.
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of
     thousands of men.
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though
     I was trying to fool with them.
And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the
     Deplaines river
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their
     women and children and a keg of beer and an accordion.

--  Carl Sandburg --
from Harvest Poems


Much too simple an answer, isn't it?  At least, I guess, for the 21st century--family, friends, a keg, and making their own music.

Carl Sandburg: Phizzog

Carl Sandburg in one of his lighter moments--or perhaps rueful might be more appropriate?


Phizzog

This face you got,
This here phizzog you carry around,
You never picked it out for yourself,
       at all, at all--did you?
This here phizzog--somebody handed it
       to you--am I right?
Somebody said, "Here's yours, now go see
       what you can do with it."
Somebody slipped it to you and it was like
       a package marked:
"No goods exchanged after being taken away"--
This face you got.

-- Carl Sandburg --

Some are winners, some losers.  I guess the best I can say about my prize is that I'm glad I'm on the inside looking out.

Carl Sandburg: a definition (nine actually) of poetry

Poets and critics and scholars have long debated the nature of poetry.  However, I don't think anyone has come up with one definition that satisfies everybody.   Carl Sandburg has come up with nine himself.


Nine Tentative (First Model) Definitions of Poetry

1.  Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged
               to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes,
              syllables, wave lengths.

2.  Poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling
                life and then entombing it.

3.  Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into 
               horizons too swift for explanations. 

4.  Poetry is a sky dark with a wild-duck migration.

5.  Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of
                the unknown and the unknowable.

6.  Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.

7.  Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made
               and why they go away. 

8.  Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and
               biscuits. 

9.  Poetry is the capture of a picture, a song, or a flair, in a
               deliberate prism of words.


Is this a poem?

I think Sandburg is really saying here that poetry can't be defined.  My favorite definition, though, comes from Robert Frost who once said, when asked what poetry was, that poetry is what gets lost in the translation.   But, if I had to choose one of Sandburg's,  I guess I'd go with No. 4.




   The sea darkening  .  .  .
Oh voices of the wild ducks
   Crying, whirling, white
                    -- Basho --

from A Little Treasury of Haiku
trans.  Peter Beilenson

Fall Equinox

Like last year, the first day of autumn, or the Fall Equinox, doesn't seem much like fall here in Tucson, where the temperature is expected to hit 100. But, the Sun and the Stars have decreed that today is the day, so here's a few poems that may be closer to reality in a month or so.

For you in northern climes, therefore:



Under the Harvest Moon

Under the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.

Under the summer roses
When the fragrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
with a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.

-- Carl Sandburg --


(Autumn--the season of memories . . .)




Yellow autumn moon . . .
Unimpressed the scarecrow stands
Simply looking bored

-- Issa --
from A Little Treasury of Haiku






Autumn Refrain

The skreak and skritter of evening gone
And grackles gone and sorrows of the sun,
The sorrows of the sun, too, gone . . . the moon and moon,
The yellow moon of words about the nightingale
In measureless measures, not a bird for me
But the name of a bird and the name of a nameless air
I have never--shall never hear. And yet beneath
The stillness that comes to me out of this, beneath
The stillness of everything gone, and being still
Being and sitting still, something resides,
Some skreaking and skrittering residuum,
And grates these evasions of the nightingale
Though I have never--shall never hear that bird.
And the stillness is in the key, all of it is,
The stillness is all in the key of that desolate sound.

--Wallace Stevens --


(I find this the most puzzling of the autumn poems.)




#656

The name - of it - is "Autumn" -
The hue - of it - is Blood -
An Artery - upon the Hill -
A Vein - along the Road -

Great Globules - in the Alleys -
And Oh, the Shower of Stain -
When winds - upset the Basin -
And spill the Scarlet Rain -

It sprinkles Bonnets - far slow -
It gathers ruddy Pools -
Then - eddies like a Rose - away -
Upon Vermilion Wheels -

-- Emily Dickinson --
from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
ed. Thomas H. Johnson


Autumn Note

The little flowers of yesterday
Have all forgotten May.
The last gold leaf
Has turned to brown.
The last bright day is grey.
The cold of winter comes apace
And you have gone away.

-- Langston Hughes --





Gathering Leaves

Spades take up leaves
No better than spoons,
And bags full of leaves
Are light as balloons.

I make a great noise
Of rustling all day
Like rabbit and deer
Running away.

But the mountains I raise
Elude my embrace,
Flowing over my arms
And into my face.

I may load and unload
Again and again
Till I fill the whole shed,
And what have I then?

Next to nothing for weight,
And since they grew duller
From contact with earth,
Next to nothing for color.

Next to nothing for use.
But a crop is a crop,
And who's to say where
The harvest shall stop?

-- Robert Frost --


(That last line raises some questions, doesn't it? Frost has a habit of doing that. Does the poem end on an ominous note?)




Dry cheerful cricket
Chirping, keeps the autumn gay . . .
Contemptuous of frost

-- Basho --
from A Little Treasury of Haiku
(This poem also seems to end on an ominous note.)

(Just noticed the double tie-ins with the previous poem.)

Carl Sandburg: "Wilderness"

This is a very strange poem I just discovered. Perhaps it's strangeness is mostly because I didn't expect something like this from Carl Sandburg--which shows that forming expectations before I've read a considerable amount of a writer's work is risky. I think of Sandburg as being a poet of urban life, of industry, and of agriculture. This poem, I think, is quite different.



WILDERNESS

"There is a wolf in me . . . fangs pointed for tearing gashes
. . . a red tongue for raw meat . . . and the hot lapping
of blood--I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it
to me and the wilderness will not let it go.

There is a fox in me . . . a silver-gray fox . . . I sniff and
guess . . . I pick things out of the wind and air . . . I
nose in the dark night and take sleepers and eat them and
hide the feathers . . . I circle and loop and double-cross.

There is a hog in me . . . a snout and a belly . . . a machinery
for eating and grunting . . . a machinery for sleeping
satisfied in the sun--I got this too from the wilderness and
the wilderness will not let it go.

There is a fish in me . . . I know I came from salt-blue water-
gates . . . I scurried with shoals of herring . . . I blew
waterspouts with porpoises . . . before land was . . . before
the water went down . . . before Noah . . . before
the first chapter of Genesis.

There is a baboon in me . . . clambering-clawed . . . dog-
faced . . . yawping a galoot's hunger . . . hairy under
the armpits . . . here are the hawk-eyed hankering men
. . . here are the blond and blue-eyed women . . . here
they hide curled asleep waiting . . . ready to snarl and
kill . . . ready to sing and give milk . . . waiting--I keep
the baboon because the wilderness says so.

There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird . . . and the eagle
flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights
among the Sierra crags of what I want . . . and the
mockingbird warbles in the early forenoon before the dew
is gone, warbles in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of
hope, gushes over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes
--And I got the eagle and the mockingbird from the
wilderness.

O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under my
bony head, under my red-valve heart--and I got something
else: it is a man-child heart, a woman-child heart:
it is a father and mother and lover: it came from God-
Knows-Where: it is going to God-Knows-Where--For I
am the keeper of the zoo: I say yes and no: I sing and
kill and work: I am a pal of the world: I came from the
wilderness."


I think I have to rethink my Sandburg.

You?

Carl Sandburg: January 6, 1878--July 22, 1967

Who is the subject of this poem by Sandburg?


Under a telephone pole

I am a copper wire slung in the air,
Slim against the sun I make not even a clear line of shadow.
Night and day I keep singing--humming and thrumming:
It is love and war and money; it is the fighting and the tears,
the work and want.
Death and laughter of men and women passing through me,
carrier of your speech,
In the rain and the wet dripping, in the dawn and the shine drying,
A copper wire.

-- Carl Sandburg --


a wire? a poet?

Carl Sandburg: January 6, 1878--July 22, 1967

I'm prejudiced here. I was born and raised (mostly) in Chicago, so Sandburg naturally was one I looked into when I first began reading poetry. He didn't get all of Chicago into his poetry, but he got more than anybody else I've read.


One of my favorite poems by Carl Sandburg.


Fog

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.


I have a cat and it's mostly grey. It frequently reminds me of Sandburg's poem.

I haven't read anything by Sandburg in many years now. Perhaps it's time to renew an old acquaintance.

Do you want to mention a favorite poem by Sandburg?

The Rubaiyat: Quatrain XIX

From the roses and hyacinths of the last quatrain, we move to another and more prosaic plant, or so it would seem, in Quatrain XIX--grass.


First Edition: Quatrain XIX

And this delightful Herb whose tender Green
Fledges the River's Lip on which we lean--
Ah, lean upon it lightly! for who knows
From what once lovely Lip it springs unseen!



Second Edition: Quatrain XXV

And this delightful Herb whose living Green
Fledges the River's Lip on which we lean--
Ah, lean upon it lightly! for who knows
From what once lovely Lip it springs unseen!



Fifth Edition: Quatrain XX

And this reviving Herb whose tender Green
Fledges the River-Lip on which we lean--
Ah, lean upon it lightly! for who knows
From what once lovely Lip it springs unseen!



The changes, though minimal in number, all occur in the first two lines of the quatrain.

"Delightful" in the first two editions now becomes "reviving" in the final edition. The change from "delightful" to "reviving" makes grass more important in that it no longer is merely "delightful," or something pleasant to the senses, but it now has a healing role: grass is a "reviving" herb, an herb that could restore energy or even bring something back to life.

The second modification is the substitution of "living" for "tender" as a modifier of "Green" in the second edition. However, FitzGerald reverts back to "tender" by the fifth edition. "Living," to me, suggests a colder, more factual perspective whereas "tender" conveys a more positive and sensual response to this "Herb."

The third and last change is that from "River's Lip" in the first two editions to "River-Lip" by the last edition. The difference is very subtle, so subtle that I can sense something but am unable to spell it out precisely. One difference that I do note is that "River-Lip" is shorter and more abrupt than "River's Lip." Perhaps you may be able to comment on the subtle nuances of "River's Lip" and "River-Lip."

According to my dictionary, "fledges" means "to cover with or as if with feathers." This definition supports "tender" far more than "living," I should think.

The quatrain flows from the previous one which suggested flowers above the bodies of those who went before us. The first two lines bring in the idea, if I'm not mistaken, of the Islamic concept of Heaven, which is frequently portrayed as a Garden laid out along a flowing river with abundant grass and flowers, a Great Oasis in fact. The last two lines carry on the theme of a covering for those who are buried beneath.

After the flowers of the last quatrain, I was surprised to find something as common or prosaic as grass. However, after thinking about it, I realized that this wasn't the only reference to grass as a burial shroud.


Grass appears in an haiku by Basho with exactly the same connotation:

Here, where a thousand
Captains swore grand conquest...tall
Grass their monument.

This also suggests the glory and dreams of past heroes, much as did earlier quatrains (see VI, VIII, IX, and XIV example). And what remains? In the haiku, grass is the only monument to their grand ambitions.



Carl Sandburg gives us the same imagery, perhaps more brutally expressed than the others--grass that covers all.


GRASS

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work--
I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg.
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor;
What place is this?
Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work.




Perhaps to end this post a bit more gently, I will quote a short stanza from Walt Whitman's most aptly named work--Leaves of Grass. It is from "Song of Myself," Stanza 6, which begins:

"A child said What is the Grass? fetching it to me with full hands,
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more
than he.

. . .

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breast of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out
of their mothers' laps.
And here you are the mothers' laps.

. . .

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end
to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses"


I guess I've wandered a bit from where I began, but I think that is an attribute of great poetry or great fiction or great prose--to begin at one point and end somewhere else, someplace unexpected, if one is lucky.

Poets and fogs and cats

I had decided that I would finally get to the collection of poetry of T. S. Eliot this year. I had dipped into the text, _The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909 -1950_ a number of times for specific poems and plays, but there was still much in there that I hadn't read.

Being a rather simple sort, I started with the first poem--"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." I had read this one before, numerous times, so it was settling back for a conversation with a old friend.

"Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table:
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
........

He's on a quest, and the third line hints that his imagery might be not what one usually gets.


Of course, when I encountered the following stanza, I had to stop and think and smile. Eliot's use of cat imagery to describe the fog seems so apt. I know he's depicting the fog, but the cat comes through so strongly to me that I picture the narrator encountering a cat on his walk.


The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.


This of course brings up another poem, one by Carl Sandburg, which is shorter but just as potent in portraying a cat.


Fog

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.


I guess Sandburg's would qualify more as a short glimpse of one, rather than any lengthy observation, such as Eliot's would suggest. This is a different cat, one on the move, and not one that settles down as Eliot's cat did. I guess that would explain why Eliot goes into more detail than Sandburg did. Perhaps Chicago fogs move more quickly than London fogs.


"And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep."

and Sandburg's

"and then moves on."


I did eventually finish "The Love Song..." that evening, but it took longer than I expected. But, no problem, that's what poems are for, I think.