To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.

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 be in dark woods and with a song
may
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 or 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 weed like a disappearing snake.
Nothing will be left white but here a birch
And there a clump of houses with a church.

AN OLD MAN'S WINTER NIGHT

All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him
at a loss.
And having scared the cellar under him
In clomping there, he scared it once again
In clomping off; and scared the outer night,
Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
But nothing so like beating on a box.
A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what;
A quiet light, and then not even that.
He consigned to the moon, such as
So late-arising, to the broken moon
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt

she

was,

Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,

And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
One aged man one man can't fill a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It's thus he does it of a winter night.

SAND DUNES

Sea waves are green and wet,
But up from where they die
Rise others vaster yet,

And those are brown and dry.

They are the sea made land
To come at the fisher town,
And bury in solid sand

The men she could not drown.

She may know cove and cape,
But she does not know mankind
If by any change of shape
She hopes to cut off mind.

Men left her a ship to sink;
They can leave her a hut as well,
And be but more free to think
For the one more cast-off shell.

THE PASSING GLIMPSE

(To Ridgely Torrence on last looking into his “Hesperides")

I often see flowers from a passing car

That are gone before I can tell what they are.

I want to get out of the train and go back
To see what they were beside the track.

I name all the kinds I am sure they weren't:
Not fireweed loving where woods have burnt-

Nor bluebells gracing a tunnel mouth
Nor lupine living on sand and drouth.

Was something brushed across my mind
That no one on earth will ever find?

Heaven gives its glimpses only to those
Not in position to look too close.

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, sceneshifter in a cheap theater, truck-handler in a brick-yard, 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

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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 divided the Pulitzer 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, which 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, a smaller collection, but an amplification of this strain, appeared in 1922. Selected Poems, with an introduction by the English critic Rebecca West, was published in 1926.

Besides his poetry, Sandburg has written two volumes of highly imaginative and, if one can conceive of such a thing, humorously mystical short tales for children: Rootabaga Stories (1922) and Rootabaga Pigeons (1923). Eight years were spent travelling and studying documents for his remarkable Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (1926), and assembling material for his collection of native folk-tunes The American Songbag (1927).

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.