Grass

“Grass” brings together Carl Sandburg as both poet and historian. As poet, Sandburg explores the range and reach of free verse. The poem is profound in its philosophical argument, but ear-friendly and even conversational; its form is eccentric and striking. But Sandburg was a student of history as well. Indeed, one of his three Pulitzer Prizes recognized his multivolume biography of Abraham Lincoln. What defines both Sandburg’s poetry and his perspective of history is his unshakeable faith in the dignity of the individual. When that respect becomes ironic, as it does in war, a nation suffers. The poem then offers Sandburg’s poetic perception of the heroic value of people, drawn as much from his own experiences traveling in the Midwest as from his respect for the tender idealism of the democratic anthems of Walt Whitman. That heroism, however, is compromised by the dehumanizing reality of war. Here, with his hard-eyed view of a historian, Sandburg exposes humanity’s self-justifying and self-sustaining wonderland logic of forgetting rather than remembering its own past.

The opening tercet (a stanza consisting of three lines) of “Grass” shocks as the poem opens with a call to pile up bodies and then unceremoniously bury them. It is an image of a mass grave. The concept of a mass grave violates Sandburg’s deep respect for the dignity of the individual. A mass grave—bodies heaped on top of each other, many unidentified, hastily interred for sanitation reasons—represents the indignity of warfare, how war, whatever the era, necessarily involves a body count and the grim reality of mass burials. Outrage would be easy, even predictable, particularly because Sandburg composed the poem as the United States was beginning to come to grips with the horrific attrition of World War I. Rather than such an incendiary and accusative voice, however, Sandburg closes this opening tercet revealing that the hunger for corpses comes from the grass itself, patient and indifferent. The grass sees that, in time, it will cover the bodies and obscure the reality of the battlefield: “I am the grass; I cover all” (Line 3).

The middle sestet (a stanza consisting of six lines) advances the argument by expanding the historical perspective to the American Civil War and then to the European battlefields of World War I. Again, the grass, insistent and insatiable, demands more bodies, calmly advising humanity itself to pile them high, the repetition of the phrase “pile high” (Lines 1, 4, 5) serving as a grim refrain. Sandburg’s own recording of the poem reflects this dark, ballad-like feel (See: Further Reading & Resources).

The job of both war poets and war historians is to remember, and this is where the poem’s irony comes in: how within a handful of years, 10 at most, battlefields will become part of the benign countryside rolling past train windows, passengers unaware of what happened there. The sacrifice of the heroic individuals will be casually, inevitably, forgotten. The passengers nonchalantly stare out of the train windows and wonder, “What place is this?” (Line 8). In the process of its renewal and regrowth, the grass itself plays a role as an unintended collaborator in humanity’s forgetfulness.

The poem closes with a couplet—in conventional poetry, a closing couplet is made up of two successive lines and offers some resolution or ultimate insight. Here, however, Sandburg offers only the chilling refrain of the grass demanding more bodies to cover. Listening to Sandburg’s own recording of the poem reveals the creepy horror of the couplet as his gravelly voice dwells on the long vowels and prolongs the sibilant s’s: “I am the grass. / Let me work,” the voice concludes in Lines 10-11. It is not that nature condones war or that the grass is somehow complicit in humanity’s violent nature. Humanity may execute wars deliberately, by design, but nature quietly does what nature does, thrive and grow. Sandburg’s is a grim sort of optimism or a radiant kind of pessimism. Sandburg the historian/poet acknowledges humanity will continue to do what it does best—destroy—and nature will continue to do what it does best—restore.