So was I once myself a swinger of birches;
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,

And life is too much like a pathless wood

Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate wilfully misunderstand me

And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.

That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

THE ONSET

Always the same when on a fated night
At last the gathered snow lets down as white
As may be in dark woods and with a song
It shall not make again all winter long-
Of hissing on the yet uncovered ground,—
I almost stumble looking up and round,
As one who, overtaken by the end,
Gives up his errand and lets death descend
Upon him where he is, with nothing done
To evil, no important triumph won
More than if life had never been begun.

Yet all the precedent is on my side:

I know that winter-death has never tried
The earth but it has failed; the snow may heap
In long storms an undrifted four feet deep
As measured against maple, birch and oak;
It cannot check the Peeper's silver croak;
And I shall see the snow all go down hill
In water of a slender April rill

That flashes tail through last year's withered brake
And dead weeds like a disappearing snake.
Nothing will be left white but here a birch
And there a clump of houses with a church.

Carl Sandburg

Carl (August) Sandburg was born of Swedish stock at Galesburg, Illinois, January 6, 1878. His schooling was haphazard; at thirteen he went to work on a milk wagon. During the next six years he was, in rapid succession, porter in a barber shop, scene-shifter in a cheap theatre, truck-handler in a brickyard, turner apprentice in a pottery, dish-washer in Denver and Omaha hotels, harvest hand in Kansas wheat fields. These tasks equipped him, as no amount of learning could have done, to be the laureate of industrial America.

In 1904, Sandburg published the proverbial "slender sheaf"; a tiny pamphlet of twenty-two poems, uneven in quality but strangely like the work of the mature Sandburg in feeling. It was twelve years later before the poet became known to the public. The vigor which lay at the heart of American toil found its outlet at last.

Chicago Poems (1916) is full of ferment; it seethes with a direct poetry surcharged with tremendous energy. Here is an almost animal exultation that is also an exaltation. Sandburg's speech is simple and powerful; he uses slang as freely (and beautifully) as his predecessors used the now archaic tongue of their times. (See Preface.) Immediately the cries of protest were heard: Sandburg was coarse and brutal; his work

ugly and distorted; his language unrefined, unfit for poetry. His detractors forgot that Sandburg was only brutal when dealing with brutality; that, beneath his toughness, he was one of the tenderest of living poets.

Cornhuskers (1918) is another step forward; it is fully as sweeping as its forerunner and far more sensitive. The gain in power and restraint is evident in the very first poem, a magnificent panoramic vision of the prairie. Here is something of the surge of a Norse saga; Cornhuskers is keen with a rude fervor, a vast sympathy for all that is splendid and terrible in Nature. But the raw violence is restrained to the point of mysticism. There are, in this volume, dozens of those delicate perceptions of beauty that must astonish those who think that Sandburg can write only a big-fisted, roughneck sort of poetry. "Cool Tombs," one of the most poignant lyrics of our time, moves with a new music; "Grass" whispers as quietly as the earlier "Fog" stole in on stealthy, cat-like feet.

Smoke and Steel (1920) which won a prize awarded to the most distinctive poetry of the year, is the sublimation of its predecessors. In this ripest of his collections, Sandburg has fused mood, accent and image in a fresh intensity. It is a fit setting for the title poem; it is, in spite of certain over-mystical accents, an epic of industrialism. Smoke-belching chimneys are here, quarries and great boulders of iron-ribbed rock; here are titanic visions: the dreams of men and machinery. And silence is here the silence of sleeping tenements and sun-soaked cornfields. Slabs of the Sunburnt West, an amplification of this strain, appeared in 1922.

What makes all this work so vital is Sandburg's own spirit: a never-sated joy in existence, a continually fresh delight in the variety and wonder of life.

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.

PRAYERS OF STEEL

Lay me on an anvil, O God.

Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar.

Let me pry loose old walls;

Let me lift and loosen old foundations.

Lay me on an anvil, O God.

Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike.

Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together. Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders. Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through blue nights into white stars.

COOL TOMBS

When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and the assassin . . . in the dust, in the cool tombs.

And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall Street, cash and collateral turned ashes. . . in the dust, in the cool tombs.

Pocahontas' body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw

in November or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder? does she remember? . . . in the dust, in the cool tombs?

Take any streetful of people buying clothes and groceries,

cheering a hero or throwing confetti and blowing tin horns. . . tell me if the lovers are losers . . . tell me if any get more than the lovers . . . in the dust... in the cool tombs.

FOG

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking

over harbor and city
on silent haunches

and then moves on.

FROM "SMOKE AND STEEL"

Smoke of the fields in spring is one,

Smoke of the leaves in autumn another.

Smoke of a steel-mill roof or a battleship funnel,

They all go up in a line with the smokestack,

Or they twist in the slow twist. . . of the wind.

If the north wind comes they run to the south.

If the west wind comes they run to the east.

By this sign

all smokes

know each other.