Grass

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1918

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form

“Grass” has an eccentric, idiosyncratic form reflecting Carl Sandburg’s commitment, beginning at Lombard College, to the intricate open-verse experiments pioneered by Walt Whitman. Formally, “Grass” is an 11-line, three-stanza poem: an opening three-line stanza (a tercet), then a six-line stanza (a sestet), and a closing two-line stanza (a couplet).

But there is a subtle argument to the poem’s eccentric, apparently arbitrary form. The poem itself appears to be shaped like a loaded gun, pointing left off the page, and it seems as if it floats in a kind of free, white space. The lines are irregular, with Lines 3 and 8-11 moving the left margin way over to the right to create additional blocks of white space that develop the overall shape. Looked at from a certain perspective, Lines 1-3 resemble a scope, and the barrel is pointed, ready to fire, an appropriate warning in a poem that cautions against the brutality of contemporary warfare. Ironically, the closing couplet, in which the grass with menacing determination demands to be allowed to do its work, functions as the grip or handle, suggesting the grass will continue to do its work as long as guns continue to do theirs.

Meter

Perhaps the best way to appreciate the dramatic meter of this apparently meter-less free-verse poem is to listen to Sandburg himself in his dramatic recitation of the poem available on YouTube (See: Further Reading & Resources).

Sandburg gives the poem a kind of lyrical song effect. It is more like a ballad than a poem. His voice rises and falls to the words themselves. In the opening line, his voice ascends to accentuate the piling “high” of bodies. He lets the “oo” at the end of “Waterloo” linger with a kind of creepy haunted-house, Boris Karloff feel. The word grass itself becomes a two-syllable unit—“gree-yass”—that is at once spooky and unsettling.

Sandburg delivers the first two lines of the sestet emphasizing their four-count beat, sounding more like he is singing the lines. In the phrase “shovel them under,” Sandburg drops his pitch with the word “under” to suggest sonically the reality of burial. The meter quickens with the “Two years, ten years” line to approximate the rush and hurry of a passing train. Then Sandburg hits the closing couplet and works the long vowels and the sibilant s’s to terrifying effect. The closing word “work” becomes a hatchet-chop single syllable with a sharp, closing “k,” which makes the word sound ruthlessly efficient, all-too-ready to work, capturing the irony of the poet, who understands that the more grass works, the more humanity has been killing itself.

Speaker

The speaker is grass. If the poem opens with a shocking crisis in narration—after all, who would demand piling high the dead bodies of soldiers?—it is resolved at the close of the opening tercet when the speaker identifies itself as the grass that grows at any battlefield site. In designing a poem in which the grass that covers over the obscenities of the battlefield has a voice, Sandburg uses a poetic device known as personification, in which a writer imbues an inanimate, nonhuman object with human characteristics, for instance, in clichés such as “a city that never sleeps,” or “time marches on.”

Personification is a shorthand method for suggesting the complexity of the inanimate object. In this poem, this device allows Sandburg to use irony. If Sandburg were to say straightforwardly to the reader, “Stop killing people in war and then pretending that it never happens; stop pretending that manicured fields did not once provide backdrop for brutal savagery,” then that bald confrontational rhetoric becomes the conventional anti-war poem typical of a pacifist. Easy to get, certainly, but in its shrill insistence, easy to ignore.

Rather, Sandburg comes at the anti-war argument obliquely, using a most unconventional speaker. After all, the grass is impatient, even a bit snarky, wanting to get to work. Using the grass as speaker highlights the irony of the situation: that the quicker the speaker returns to its work, the sooner the bodies are covered, and the sooner humanity can ignore the brutalities of war and begin the serious business of starting new wars all over again.