Grass

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1918

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Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

The Dehumanizing Brutality of War

Civilizations back to Antiquity have elevated the drama of war and have celebrated its heroes. The figure of the soldier assumes larger-than-life proportions and becomes the subject of epical works that create an ennobling purpose and significance about the field of battle. For millennia, humanity has accorded a special dignity to its soldiers who die in the service of their countries, in defense of an ideal. They are remembered in public memorial services that consecrate their memory and endow their deaths with dignity and spiritual importance.

This poem, however, argues that war dehumanizes those who serve and invariably die. The poem reminds readers of the reality of battlefields, even those battles most elevated by their cultures, battles that are seen as momentous events that determine the course of history itself. Even there, battlefields are where hundreds and thousands of dead, many ripped into bloody fragments, scatter the landscape.

Since the emergence of the camera in the mid-19th century, battlefield photographers have revealed the ugly secret of war’s greatest battles: Soldiers, lots of them, die in numbers too great to give them each the individual respect and dignity their sacrifice demands. Pile them high, the grass advises, and shovel them under. Then multiply Carl Sandburg’s argument by the countless battles and skirmishes that have been fought daily for centuries, bloody encounters that do not become even the footnotes in history. Then imagine the events that Sandburg could not have anticipated in 1918: the Holocaust and Hiroshima.

In battle, Sandburg argues, soldiers are dehumanized, their corpses stacked like cord wood. The speaker/grass repeats the phrase “pile high” three times (Lines 1, 4, 5), the adverb “high” suggesting the degree of the brutality of war. Confronted by the sheer volume of the dead, memorial services become ironic, individual heroes becoming nearly impossible to recognize. The poem reminds readers of that reality by twice using the term “shovel them under” (Lines 2, 6) to suggest the indignity of mass graves and the dehumanizing brutality of war.

The Selective Amnesia of History

“Grass” is and is not a lesson in history. The argument Sandburg makes about war is grounded in turning-point battles. Yet for all their titanic import, for the perception that in these battles, history itself was written, the battles have faded into obscurity, thinned into footnotes. It is a validation of Sandburg’s argument that most contemporary readers are not familiar with names like Austerlitz, Verdun, and Ypres. Waterloo might be slightly more familiar because it has become a cultural cliché suggesting a person’s sudden and unanticipated fall from power. Only Gettysburg might resonate, and that is thanks to films, History Channel specials, and Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address consecrating the battlefield. When pressed, however, few know why the battle—or any of the battles Sandburg references—was significant.

Herein lies the point that Sandburg, himself a historian, makes about history itself. The bloodiest, most tragic battles in history inevitably fade to irrelevance despite their perceived import and massive body counts. Two years, ten years, the poet says, the battles do not matter. Military history is written in disappearing ink. Those passengers on a train rolling past the battlefields have no idea of the drama that unfolded there, all of it inevitably fading to irrelevancy, becoming answers to game show trivia questions or the subject of lectures in a classroom.

Before Waterloo and Verdun became tourist destinations, before Austerlitz faded to a Wikipedia entry, before Gettysburg became a mini-series on the History Channel, they were sites of fierce and brutal real-time battles where, in the confusion and chaos, thousands of soldiers—young men and women with families, with hopes and dreams—died ingloriously in quantities so vast they fused into a data point: 50,000 here, 70,000 there, another 800,000 there. Those data points boggle the intellect’s ability to grasp their implications, even as history fades them into a paragraph or two in a book, chapters that students can quickly forget once the final exams are over. Thus, Sandburg here affirms the dark wisdom of philosopher George Santayana (1863-1952), who in 1905 wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” a quote Sandburg was fond of paraphrasing in interviews.

The Abiding Power of Nature

Against the violent and brutal reality of human history, Sandburg juxtaposes the abiding power of nature, suggested by the poem’s use of the blanket of grass that inevitably grows as nature upcycles battlefields back into fields. If the history of humanity is recorded in battles, from minor to epical, nature’s resilience puts such conflicts within a broader and, for Sandburg, disturbing context. Wars start and end, generals rise and fall, armies amass and then collapse. Against and amid the attrition of body counts, the earth endures forever. That, according to the argument of the poem, is the grass’s work.

Sandburg came of age in the end-of-19th-century heyday of Naturalism, with its appreciation of nature’s formidable power that was indifferent to the furious busyness of humanity. And later, he was trained as a hard-eyed journalist committed to investigating the world as it is with careful objectivity. Given those influences, Sandburg sees in nature a power greater than anything unleashed by generals and politicians. As nature reclaims battlefields from Marathon to Khe Sahn, from Manassas to Iwo Jima, Sandburg shares his sense of nature’s permanence, putting into perspective grandiose perceptions of humanity’s importance and at the same time elevating the earth far beyond humanity’s rapacious appetite for war: “I am the grass. / Let me work” (Lines 10-11).

If it is the prerogative of humanity to fight, then it is the work of nature to thrive. If war is violent and penetrative, assaultive and intrusive, then nature is quiet, elegant, determined, and unstoppable. Nature will not be contained, much less endangered, by humanity’s grievances, even on the scale of Ypres or Waterloo. In this, the poem offers a difficult kind of hope. Even as humanity continues to devise deadlier technologies to exterminate each other, nature will always be more determined to live.