The Sandburg Treasury

by Carl Sandburg

  And leap with cumulative speed

  To test the challenge of the sea.

  Plunging,

  Doggedly onward plunging,

  Into salt and mist and foam and sun.

  FROM THE SHORE

  A lone gray 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.

  FLUX

  Sand of the sea runs red

  Where the sunset reaches and quivers.

  Sand of the sea runs yellow

  Where the moon slants and wavers.

  SKY PRAYERS

  from GOOD MORNING, AMERICA

  Sea sunsets, give us keepsakes.

  Prairie gloamings, pay us for prayers.

  Mountain clouds on bronze skies—

  Give us great memories.

  Let us have summer roses.

  Let us have tawny harvest haze in pumpkin time.

  Let us have springtime faces to toil for and play for.

  Let us have the fun of booming winds on long waters.

  Give us dreamy blue twilights—of winter evenings—to wrap us in a coat of dreaminess.

  Moonlight, come down—shine down, moonlight—meet every bird cry and every song calling to a hard old earth, a sweet young earth.

  ROLLING CLOUDS

  from SKY TALK

  Wool white horses and their heads sag and roll,

  Snow white sheep and their tails drag far,

  Impossible animals ever more impossible—

  They walk on the sky to say How do you do?

  Or Good-by or Back-soon-maybe.

  Or would you say any white flowers come more lovely than certain white clouds?

  Or would you say any tall mountains beckon,

  rise and beckon beyond certain tall walking clouds?

  Is there any roll of white sea-horses equal to the sky-horse white of certain clouds rolling?

  BABY SONG OF THE FOUR WINDS

  Let me be your baby, south wind.

  Rock me, let me rock, rock me now.

  Rock me low, rock me warm.

  Let me be your baby.

  Comb my hair, west wind.

  Comb me with a cowlick.

  Or let me go with a pompadour.

  Come on, west wind, make me your baby.

  North wind, shake me where I’m foolish.

  Shake me loose and change my ways.

  Cool my ears with a blue sea wind.

  I’m your baby, make me behave.

  And you, east wind, what can I ask?

  A fog comfort? A fog to tuck me in?

  Fix me so and let me sleep.

  I’m your baby—and I always was.

  BROKEN SKY

  The sky of gray is eaten in six places,

  Rag holes stand out.

  It is an army blanket and the sleeper

  slept too near the fire.

  SANTA FE SKETCH

  The valley was swept with a blue broom to the west.

  And to the west, on the fringes of a mesa sunset,

  there are blue broom leavings, hangover blue wisps—

  bluer than the blue floor the broom touched

  before and after it caught the blue sweepings.

  The valley was swept with a blue broom to the west.

  SILVER POINT

  The silver point of an evening star

  dropping toward the hammock of new moon

  over Lake Okoboji, over prairie waters in Iowa—

  it was framed in the lights just after twilight.

  WIND SONG

  Long ago I learned how to sleep,

  In an old apple orchard where the wind swept by counting its money and throwing it away,

  In a wind-gaunt orchard where the limbs forked out and listened or never listened at all,

  In a passel of trees where the branches trapped the wind into whistling, “Who, who are you?”

  I slept with my head in an elbow on a summer afternoon and there I took a sleep lesson.

  There I went away saying: I know why they sleep, I know how they trap the tricky winds.

  Long ago I learned how to listen to the singing wind and how to forget and how to hear the deep whine,

  Slapping and lapsing under the day blue and the night stars: Who, who are you?

  Who can ever forget

  listening to the wind go by

  counting its money

  and throwing it away?

  Prairie-Town Boy

  To John Carl and Karlen Paula

  Prologue: Prairie Town

  PEOPLE FROM NEW England and their children owned much of the town of Galesburg, Illinois, and set the main tone in politics, churches, schools and colleges. Up from Kentucky and Tennessee had come English and Scotch-Irish breeds. Many Swedes had become voters and a power in politics and business. In, the two and a half blocks between our house and the railroad yards the Swedes were largest in number, then the “native-born,” two or three Yankees, two English families, a sprinkling of Irish and Germans, and in the early 1890’s a flood of Italians, some thirty men, women, and children in two houses next to the Narrow Gauge railroad tracks.

  Often in the 1890’s I would get to thinking about what a young prairie town Galesburg was—nearly twenty thousand people, and they had all come in fifty years. Before that it was empty rolling prairie. There was no standard pioneer cut to a regular pattern. Most of them could stand hard work and streaks of back luck. They had broken the prairie, laid the first roads and streets, built the first schools and churches, colored the traditions of the town and country where I was born and raised. As a boy I saw some of these old-timers in their seventies or eighties, hard-bitten, grizzled and fading. I tried in my boy mind to picture them standing where there wasn’t a wall or a roof on Main Street not yet a street—no streets anywhere and no houses—looking around and deciding where to clear for the first row of houses, the Public Square, the church, the blacksmith shop, the general store—and the college to be the focus of light and hope for the youth and the coming generations. They saw their little town rise to be a place and a name where before had been silence broken only by wild-animal cries, by the recurring rains and winds.

  They had left Ohio, New York, Tennessee, or Kentucky in a wagon holding family—sometimes six, eight, or ten children—and household goods. They had driven their horses over wilderness trails where often the feet of horses, the rims and spokes of wheels, tangled in underbrush. They camped where night found them and took up their journey again at daylight. Some had made part of their trip on flatboats or paddle-wheel steamboats—the generation who arrived before the railroad came to Knox County in 1854.

  At the time I was born, one pioneer stood out above all others in the town and county—George W. Brown, then mayor of Galesburg. A farm boy in Saratoga County, New York, he learned the carpenter’s trade, and worked on the earliest railroads of the Mohawk Valley. He heard from relatives of good land cheap in Illinois, and in 1836, at twenty-one, he and his wife rode a covered wagon west for weeks on weeks while the rains came nearly every day and the wagon wheels stuck in mud and clay and had to be lifted or pried loose. In July, some nine miles from Galesburg, he traded his team of horses for an eighty of land. His wife ran the farm while he built houses. I
n later years, in Galesburg, Knoxville, Henderson Grove, they pointed to houses well built by George W. Brown. He laid by what he could of his earnings while thinking and studying and experimenting with a machine to plant corn.

  In the spring of 1852 he planted with his machine sixteen acres of corn for himself and eight acres for a neighbor. That year he planned and hoped to finish ten machines, and he completed only one. He sold livestock, then his last horse, for means to clinch his patents. In order to go on and produce and sell his cornplanters, he sold his farm and borrowed money at ten per cent interest. In 1856 he got his shops in Galesburg going and made six hundred cornplanters and the next year a thousand. His machines spread over the Midwest during the war years, 1861–1865, and they were credited with food-production increase that helped the North in winning the war.

  When I was growing up the Brown Cornplanter Works produced and sold eight thousand machines a year. He had two hundred men working for him, his shops covering all of a city block except the corner lot he reserved for the new Methodist Church of which he was a regularly attending member.

  When we walked the four and a half dusty miles of the Knoxville Road to the County Fair, we passed the old home of Isaac Guliher. Born in Christian County, Kentucky, he had moved to Sangamon County, Illinois, in 1830, and at seventeen years of age in 1832 had enlisted for the Black Hawk War and served as a private under Captain Abraham Lincoln, moving to Knox County in 1833. In 1858 when Lincoln was on his way from Knoxville to Galesburg to debate with Douglas, he was told this was the house where Isaac Guliher lived and Lincoln got out of his buggy and a mile of buggies and wagons stopped for ten minutes while Lincoln walked in and drank a dipper of cold water with old Sangamon County friends.

  Out on the Seminary Street road was the five-hundred-and-forty-seven-acre farm of Daniel Green Burner. He had come to Knox County from New Salem, Illinois, where he had lived four years and had seen young Abraham Lincoln march off to the Black Hawk War. He had traded at the grocery where Lincoln served customers and he had noticed young Lincoln’s ways with people. Mr. Burner told a reporter for a Galesburg paper that “Lincoln was as full of fun as a dog is of fleas. . . . He would back up against a wall and stretch out his arms; I never saw a man with so great a stretch. He did little things like that to please people. . . . He did not go to others for his amusement, but if they wanted fun, they came to him and found him full of it . . .” It would have been nice if I could have worked on Mr. Burner’s farm in hay harvest and sat at table and heard him talk about Lincoln and New Salem days.

  Knox College, Lombard College, and Brown’s Business College gave Galesburg the nickname of “College City.” Several times when carrying a two-gallon can of milk I met on streets near Knox College a little man who would nod to me without speaking and to whom I would nod without speaking. He wore a tight-fitting, square-cornered, single-breasted black coat to his knees with buttons running up to his chin. You couldn’t see his collar from in front because of his white beard that spread like a fan and covered jaws, chin, and upper lip. Once on Main Street I heard a man say, “That fellow used to know Abe Lincoln.” I learned he had been elected Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Illinois seven times and served fourteen years, that his room in the State House at Springfield was next to one Lincoln used when a candidate and he and Lincoln had had friendly talks.

  This was Newton Bateman, sometimes called “Little Newt,” president of Knox College. He said that Lincoln would introduce him as “My little friend, the big schoolmaster of Illinois,” and that Lincoln once brought him a letter asking if there should be any corrections in grammar, saying, “I never was very strong on grammar.” He saw Lincoln walk back and forth, he said, troubled about the storm that was to sweep the country, saying, “I am nothing but truth is everything.” He said too he was the last man to shake hands and say good-by to President-elect Lincoln before the train pulled out from Springfield bound for Washington.

  Newton Bateman was born in New Jersey in 1822. His father, a weaver and a cripple, took his wife and five children West to Illinois in a covered wagon in 1833. Near Jacksonville the Asiatic cholera struck down the mother, and people in a panic fear of the plague saw to it that she was buried in fast time, so fast that the grave wasn’t marked. Her youngest son Newton in after years made searches for it but couldn’t locate the grave. In his struggle toward an education, he lived for a time on mush and milk at eleven cents a week, walked with a peddler’s pack on his back and sold pins, needles, thread, “notions.” He had aimed at being a minister, and then changed to teaching. He was principal of the Jacksonville schools and organized the State Teachers Association. He was president of Knox from 1875 to 1892, the longest time any president of Knox had stayed. It was said that under him more graduates went out into the world and made big names for themselves than under any president before him. “He had character,” I heard one man say, “and it reached the students.”

  Little Newt dropped out as president of Knox when he was seventy, went on teaching a few classes while a new president took the chair—John Huston Finley, twenty-nine years old and “the youngest college president in the United States.” I met Finley several times, carrying my two-gallon can of milk, but he passed by, his head down, his mind far away. Finley made Knox known over the country as a college where Lincoln and Douglas had debated. He put on an Anniversary celebration of the debate on October 7, 1896. I got away from the milk wagon in time to wedge through the crowd for a good look at Chauncey M. Depew in a Prinz Albert coat, with a fedora on his head as he spoke. The day was cold and men on the platform wore overcoats with the collars turned up. I don’t remember a word Chauncey Depew said, but I could say I had seen the president of the New York Central Railway and a man who in 1864 made stump speeches over all of New York State for Lincoln for President.

  Robert Todd Lincoln, the son of Abraham Lincoln, made a short speech that afternoon. I wondered what kind of talks he had had with his father in the White House, what kind of a Secretary of War he had been in the cabinets of Presidents Garfield and Arthur. I had read of how at one Republican National Convention after another some delegate always nominated him for President and he would get one vote. In his short speech he didn’t say anything I went away thinking about.

  In those years as a boy in that prairie town I got education in scraps and pieces of many kinds, not knowing they were part of my education. I met people in Galesburg who were puzzling to me, and later when I read Shakespeare I found those same people were puzzling to him. I met little wonders of many kinds among animals and plants that never lost their wonder for me, and I found later that these same wonders had a deep interest for Emerson, Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. I met superstitions, folk tales, and folklore while I was a young spalpeen, “a broth of a boy,” long before I read books about them. All had their part, small or large, in the education I got outside of books and schools.

  One: Home Folks

  OF THE HOUSE where I was born I remember nothing—a three-room frame house on Third Street, the second house east of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad tracks, in Galesburg, Illinois. The date was January 6, 1878, a little after midnight. The first baby, some three years earlier, was my sister Mary. They wanted a boy. I was a welcome man-child.

  Mary once pointed to the cradle in later years and said, “When they took me out, they put him in.” The cradle stood on three legs at each end, and mother told Mary that father had made it. A year and a half later they took me out to put Mart in.

  I was born on a cornhusk mattress. Until I was past ten or more years, when we became a family of nine, the mattresses were bedticking filled with cornhusks. As we all slept well on cornhusks and never knew the feel of feather beds till far later years, we were in favor of what we had. Of the slats on which the mattress rested, we sometimes murmured. One would break, then another, till finally the mattress crashed to the floor—and we were suspicious of the new slats.

  We moved to another three-
room one-story house, on the north side of South Street, three doors west of Pearl. Here I wore dresses and watched my father spade a garden and plant and dig potatoes and carrots. I liked the feel of potatoes and carrots as my fingers brushed the black loam off them and I threw them into baskets. Here we had the mare Dolly—a small bay, old, fat and slow—kept in a shed at the end of the lot. Dolly pulled us in a four-wheeled, twp-seater wagon out from the town streets and houses to where we saw for the first time the open country, rolling prairie and timber, miles of zigzag rail fences, fields of corn and oats, cows, sheep, and horses feeding in pastures. Grazing animals in the open had wonder for me.

  We were regular at Swedish Lutheran Church services, though about once a month of a Sunday morning father would throw the harness on old Dolly and the word was, “We are going to the Kranses.” Out seven miles near a small coal-mine crossroads with a post office named Soperville, on a thirty-acre farm, lived John and his wife Lena Krans. Lena was a cousin of my mother. Those four Swedish-born Americans had warm kinship. Their faces lighted on seeing each other, and their talk ran warm and pleasant. They were all strong for work, liked it, and talked it in those years of their thirties. The Swedish language was hurled back and forth, too swift for us children to be sure what they were saying. But when they talked of the steerage trip from Sweden, six to ten weeks on a sailing ship, their food only the black bread and cheese and baloney they brought along, we knew it was rugged going. Often we heard from father and mother, “In the old country we had white bread only at Easter and Christmas. Here in America we have white bread every day in the year!”