The Sandburg Treasury

by Carl Sandburg

  As the years pass by and experience writes out new records in our mind life, we go back to some works of art that we rejected in the early days and find values we missed. Work, love, laughter, pain, death, put impressions on us as time passes, and as we brood over what has happened.

  Out of songs and scars and the mystery of personal development, we get eyes that pick out intentions we had not seen before in people, in works of art, in books and poetry.

  Naturally, too, the reverse happens. What we register to at one period of life, what we find gay and full of fine nourishment at one time, we find later has lost interest for us. A few masterpieces may last across the years but we usually discard some. A few masterpieces are enough. Why this is so we do not know. For each individual his new acquisitions and old discards are different.

  The books and poems at hand ready for each of us are so many and so different that we use and throw away, acquire and discard, according to personal taste, and often merely guided by whim like the man in the song, “I want what I want when I want it.” Too often both among young people and grownups, there is a careless drifting and they take the easiest way in books and poetry. Millions read without asking themselves why they read and whether in all their reading they have learned anything worth the spending of their time.

  It was not for nothing Thoreau said an old newspaper would do for him just as well as a new one. Each of us can sit alone with our conscience for a while on the proposition of Robert Louis Stevenson that the intelligent man can find an Iliad of the human race in a newspaper. And any kindly philosopher could write a thick book on why the shrewd, tolerant reader enjoys even a stupid, vain, hypocritical book because the writer of the book is etching his own portrait on every page, stepping forth and talking off lines like one of the fools, clowns or pretenders in a Russian play. Healthy questions for each of us: “Why do I read books? What do books do to me? Can I improve my form as a reader? What does poetry do to me? Why do I need this or that poetry?”

  We have heard much in our time about free verse being modern, as though it is a new-found style for men to use in speaking and writing, rising out of the machine age, skyscrapers, high speed and jazz. Now, if free verse is a form of writing poetry without rhyme, without regular meters, without established and formal rules governing it, we can easily go back to the earliest styles of poetry known to the human family—and the style is strictly free verse. Before men invented the alphabet, so that poems could be put down in writing, they spoke their poems. When one man spoke to another in a certain timebeat and rhythm, if it happened that his words conveyed certain impressions and moods to his listeners, he was delivering poetry to them, whether he knew it or they knew it, and whether he or they had a name for an art which the poet was practicing on himself and them.

  We may go through thousands of pages of the reports of songs, poems and spoken dreams of American Indians as recorded in the volumes of the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution at Washington, and we find it all to be in the free verse style. The poems of the ancient Chinese writers Li Po, Tu Fu and others, as read in translations, and as notated by the translators, show how strange and marvelous moments of life can be captured and compressed in the manner called free verse. The Bible is one of the sublime sources of free verse. The orations of Moses, the Book of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Sermon on the Mount, the “love chapter” of the Apostle Paul, these are in the free verse style of writing poetry.

  If those who write in the free verse style fail at getting onto paper any lines worth reading twice, they are in the same class with those who in regular, ordered, formal verse fail to get onto paper lines worth reading twice. The crimes of free verse have been many. The same goes for sonnets, ballads, ballades, triolets, rondeaus, villanelles, and the forms of verse which are governed by hexameters, pentameters, iambics, strophes and by laws which dictate how many syllables shall be permitted to perch on each line of the poem.

  Perhaps no wrong is done and no temple of human justice violated in pointing out here that each authentic poet makes a style of his own. Sometimes this style is so clearly the poet’s own that when he is imitated it is known who is imitated. Shakespeare, Villon, Li Po, Whitman—each sent forth his language and impress of thought and feeling from a different style of gargoyle spout. In the spacious highways of great books each poet is allowed the stride that will get him where he wants to go.

  Should children write poetry? Yes, whenever they feel like it. If nothing else happens they will find it a training for writing and speaking in other fields of human work and play. No novelist has been a worse writer for having practiced at poetry. Many a playwright, historian, essayist, editorial writer, could have improved his form by experimenting with poetry.

  At what age should a child begin writing poetry? Any age. Poems are made of words and when a child is learning to talk, to shape words on its tongue, is a proper time for it to speak poetry—if it can.

  Does it help a child poet to have praise for his poems? The child should be told that poetry is first of all for the poet, that great poets usually die saying their best work is not written. Perhaps it is wise for every child to be told that it is a mistake for either a child or a grown-up accomplished artist to be satisfied with any past performance.

  The foremost American woman poet, Emily Dickinson, had scarcely any of her poetry published in her lifetime. What she wrote had to be. And it is doubtful if her poems would have had the same complete glory they have if she had been taken up and praised. On the other hand, there have been poets saved to live and write beautiful pages because they found friends, an audience, and enough money to keep the wolf from sniffing round their little doorways.

  The father of a great Irish poet once remarked, “What can be explained is not poetry.” There are people who want a book of verse to be like the arithmetic—you turn to the back of the book and find the answers. Ken Nakazawa notes, “The poems that are obvious are like the puzzles that are already solved. They deny us the joy of seeking and creating.”

  Once a little girl showed to a friend a poem she had written. “Why didn’t you make it longer?” asked the friend. “I could have,” she answered, “but then it wouldn’t have been a poem.” She meant she left something in the air for the reader of the poem to linger over, as any of us do over a rose or a sunset or a face. Roses, sunsets, faces, have mystery. If we could explain them, then after having delivered our explanations we could say, “Take it from me, that’s all there is to it, and there’s no use your going any further for I’ve told you all there is and there isn’t any more.”

  If poems could be explained, then poets would have to leave out roses, sunsets, faces, from their poems. Yet it seems that for thousands of years poets have been writing about roses, sunsets, faces, because they have mystery, significance, and a heavy or a light beauty, an appeal, a lesson and a symbolism that stays with us long as we live. It was something like this in the heart of the philosopher who declared, “What can be explained is not poetry.”

  Pictures of Today

  POTOMAC TOWN IN FEBRUARY

  The bridge says: Come across, try me; see how good I am.

  The big rock in the river says: Look at me; learn how to stand up. The white water says: I go on; around, under, over, I go on.

  A kneeling, scraggly pine says: I am here yet; they nearly got me last year.

  A sliver of moon slides by on a high wind calling: I know why; I’ll see you tomorrow; I’ll tell you everything tomorrow.

  PEOPLE WHO MUST

  I painted on the roof of a skyscraper.

  I painted a long while and called it a day’s work.

  The people on a corner swarmed and the traffic cop’s whistle never let up all afternoon.

  They were the same as bugs, many bugs on their way—

  Those people on the go or at a standstill;

  And the traffic cop a spot of blue, a splinter of brass,

  Where the black tides ran around him

 
And he kept the street. I painted a long while

  And called it a day’s work.

  SKY PIECES

  PROUDLY the fedoras march on the heads of the somewhat careless men.

  Proudly the slouches march on the heads of the still more careless men.

  Proudly the panamas perch on the noggins of dapper debonair men.

  Comically somber the derbies gloom on the earnest solemn noodles.

  And the sombrero, most proud, most careless, most dapper and debonair of all, somberly the sombrero marches on the heads of important men who know what they want.

  Hats are sky pieces; hats have a destiny; wish your hat slowly; your hat is you.

  NEW FARM TRACTOR

  Snub nose, the guts of twenty mules are in your cylinders and transmission.

  The rear axles hold the kick of twenty Missouri jackasses.

  It is in the records of the patent office and the ads there is twenty horsepower pull here.

  The farm boy says hello to you instead of twenty mules—he sings to you instead of ten span of mules.

  A bucket of oil and a can of grease is your hay and oats.

  Rain proof and fool proof they stable you anywhere in the fields with the stars for a roof.

  I carve a team of long ear mules on the steering wheel—it’s good-by now to leather reins and the songs of the old mule skinners.

  DAN

  Early May, after cold rain the sun baffling cold wind.

  Irish setter pup finds a corner near the cellar door,

  all sun and no wind,

  Cuddling there he crosses forepaws and lays his skull

  Sideways on this pillow, dozing in a half-sleep,

  Browns of hazel nut, mahogany, rosewood, played off

  against each other on his paws

  and head.

  EVEN NUMBERS

  1

  A house like a man all lean and coughing,

  a man with his two hands in the air at a cry,

  “Hands up.”

  A house like a woman shrunken and stoop-shouldered,

  shrunken and done with dishes and dances.

  These two houses I saw going uphill in Cincinnati.

  2

  Two houses leaning against each other like drunken

  brothers at a funeral,

  Two houses facing each other like two blind wrestlers

  hunting a hold on each other,

  These four scrawny houses I saw on a dead level

  cinder patch in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

  3

  And by the light of a white moon in Waukesha, Wisconsin,

  I saw a lattice work in lilac time . . . white-mist lavender

  . . . a sweet moonlit lavender . . .

  SLOW PROGRAM

  The iron rails run into the sun.

  The setting of the sun chooses an hour.

  The red rail ribbons run into the red ball sun.

  The ribbons and the ball change like red water lights.

  The picture floats with a slow program of red haze lights.

  PHIZZOG

  This face you got,

  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.

  AGAIN?

  Old Man Woolworth put up a building.

  There it was; his dream; all true;

  The biggest building in the world.

  Babel, the Nineveh Hanging Gardens,

  Karnak, all old, outclassed.

  And now, here at last, what of it?

  What about it? Well, every morning

  We’ll walk around it and look up.

  And every morning we’ll ask what

  It means and where it’s going.

  It’s a dream; all true; going somewhere,

  That’s a cinch; women buying mousetraps,

  Wire cloth dishrags, ten cent sheet music,

  They paid for it; the electric tower

  Might yell an electric sign to the inbound

  Ocean liners, “Look what the washerwomen

  Of America can do with their nickels,” or

  “See what a nickel and a dime can do,”

  And that wouldn’t clear Old Man Woolworth’s

  Head; it was a mystery, a dream, the biggest

  Building in the world; Babel, the Nineveh

  Hanging Gardens, Karnak, all old,

  Outclassed. So the old man cashes in,

  The will of the old man is dug out,

  And the widow gets thirty million dollars,

  Enough to put up another building,

  Another bigger than any in the world,

  Bigger than Babel, the Nineveh Hanging Gardens,

  Karnak, another mystery, another dream

  To stand and look up at

  And ask what it means.

  BUFFALO DUSK

  The buffaloes are gone.

  And those who saw the buffaloes are gone.

  Those who saw the buffaloes by thousands and how they pawed the prairie sod into dust with their hoofs, their great heads down pawing on in a great pageant of dusk,

  Those who saw the buffaloes are gone.

  And the buffaloes are gone.

  PLUNGER

  Empty the last drop.

  Pour out the final clinging heartbeat.

  Great losers look on and smile.

  Great winners look on and smile.

  Plunger:

  Take a long breath and let yourself go.

  Children

  CHILD MOON

  The child’s wonder

  At the old moon

  Comes back nightly.

  She points her finger

  To the far silent yellow thing

  Shining through the branches

  Filtering on the leaves a golden sand,

  Crying with her little tongue, “See the moon!”

  And in her bed fading to sleep

  With babblings of the moon on her little mouth.

  UPSTAIRS

  I too have a garret of old playthings.

  I have tin soldiers with broken arms upstairs.

  I have a wagon and the wheels gone upstairs.

  I have guns and a drum, a jumping-jack and a magic lantern.

  And dust is on them and I never look at them upstairs.

  I too have a garret of old playthings.

  WINTER MILK

  The milk-drops on your chin, Helga,

  Must not interfere with the cranberry red of your cheeks

  Nor the sky winter blue of your eyes.

  Let your mammy keep hands off the chin.

  This is a high holy spatter of white on the reds and blues.

  Before the bottle was taken away,

  Before you so proudly began today

  Drinking your milk from the rim of a cup

  They did not splash this high holy white on your chin.

  There are dreams in your eyes, Helga.

  Tall reaches of wind sweep the clear blue.

  The winter is young yet, so young.

  Only a little cupful of winter has touched your lips.

  Drink on . . . milk with your lips . . . dreams with your eyes.

  FIVE CENT BALLOONS

  Pietro has twenty red and blue balloons on a string.

  They flutter and dance pulling Pietro’s arm.

  A nickel apiece is what they sell for.

  Wishing children tag Pietro’s heels.

  He sells out and goes the streets alone.

  BABY TOES

  There is a blue star, Janet,

  Fifteen years’ ride from us,

  If we ride a hundred miles an hour.

  There is a white s
tar, Janet,

  Forty years’ ride from us,

  If we ride a hundred miles an hour.

  Shall we ride

  To the blue star

  Or the white star?

  THEME IN YELLOW

  I spot the hills

  With yellow balls in autumn.

  I light the prairie cornfields

  Orange and tawny gold clusters

  And I am called pumpkins.

  On the last of October

  When dusk is fallen

  Children join hands

  And circle round me

  Singing ghost songs

  And love to the harvest moon;

  I am a jack-o’-lantern

  With terrible teeth

  And the children know

  I am fooling.

  HELGA

  The wishes on this child’s mouth

  Came like snow on marsh cranberries;

  The tamarack kept something for her;

  The wind is ready to help her shoes.