Sandburg's Common Death & Beauty

            After spending a semester reading arguably some of the best American writers, it is interesting to finish the semester with Carl Sandburg. Sandburg deliberately set out to write poetry about common experiences and feelings for common people. This type of poetry has a large obvious contrast to that of T.S. Eliot. Sandburg does not require you to figure out 50 allusions to understand 2 lines of poetry. This sort of ease and relatable quality is much like a breath of fresh air. However, just because Sandburg writes easily about common experience does not mean that the poems lack depth in any sort of fashion. Sandburg’s Cool Tombs and Grass both address harsh human realities, but in an easy to grasp way.

            Cool Tombs begins with three notable historical figures, who were all dead at the time of writing (and are still dead).  Lincoln is often thought of as one of the most influential presidents, but he still had enemies. Grant also accomplished much in office, but lost everything because of his corrupt dealing. Pocahontas has become idealized for her helping of the settlers, but at the same time leaving her own people. All of these people had built a strong legacy that was not perfect, but in many senses admirable. However, they all also died and forgot all of their successes and failures “in the dust, in the cool tombs.”  Sandburg seems to be reminding all of us that we cannot take our legacies, good or bad, with us. The fourth stanza takes a slightly different and more personal tone for all of us – it turns directly to the common person. In this stanza Cool Tombs forces each of us to re-evaluate our lives and realize the brevity of it. We do not “get any more than the lovers” and just like the three historical figures before us nothing is left or matters “in the dust . . . in the cool tombs.”  Life is what it is, and we need to make the most it while we still can.

            Sandburg’s Grass is actually written from the perspective of grass. Grass seems to grow nearly everywhere it is allowed to grow, especially in the Midwest, where Sandburg was from. Yet, rarely do we ever consider the restorative work that this plant does.  The narrator in the poem asks for the dead from five different battles, and in this implies that it takes the dead of the whole world. The dead, who according to Cool Tombs no longer remember their lives or have accomplishments.  The grass asks for the dead, so that it may be allowed to ‘work.’ In life, we bury the dead and then from their burial place grows grass; this is a common event. Sandburg is reminding all of us of the redemptive work that one of the most common plants – grass, does for all of us every day. The grass takes the old, dead, and now useless bodies and turns them into beautiful landscaping. Through this view we are able to find beauty in death as well as redemption in nature.  It is this type of beauty and redemption, which is not afforded to us by Cool Tombs, because we cannot achieve it. It is not us, but nature that makes and creates the beauty and redemption of death.

            Sandburg definitely had skill at being able to take a mundane everyday object, such as grass, and use to create a poem with much more depth than it would originally seem.  The Norton Anthology does a great job pairing Cool Tombs and Grass. Both of these poems deal with death, the brevity of life, and the after-effects, but from two very different perspectives. Cool Tombs shows a more personal perspective, where we see historical figures, and ourselves, remember and retain nothing from this life in death.  On the other hand, Grass shows us how our deaths, even in the most brutal of forms from war, can bring about beauty through nature and the growing of grass.  Much of the growing in nature is dependent upon the circle of life. Instead of stacking the bodies we ought to let nature take its’ course and do its’ work creating beauty and thereby redemption through death, but in the mean time we ought to make our lives worthwhile.  While these Sandburg poems focus on death, they also serve to remind us about life.