Here’s one I remember from a literature class. I don’t know whether it was assigned or whether I just read it, but it’s short and memorable:
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
***
I think I remember someone commenting that she’d named her cat (a gray cat, as you’d expect) Little Cat Feet. I thought that was marvelous. I don’t remember any other poems of Sandburg’s. Here’s another:
Under the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.
Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.
***
I love that! I’m glad I happened to google “classic poets born in January,” and then it turns out Carl Sandburg was born January 6th in 1878, and at once I thought how perfect, let me find Little Cat Feet. Then I looked for a few other poems, and here this one was. You know, if I ever name a character the Gray Mocker, you’ll know where that came from. Here’s another:
***
Winds of the Windy City, come out of the prairie,
all the way from Medicine Hat.
Come-out of the inland sea-blue water, come where they
nickname a city for you.
Corn wind in the fall, come off the black lands,
come off the whisper of the silk hangers,
the lap of the flat spear leaves.
Blue-water wind in summer, come off the blue miles
of lake, carry your inland sea-blue fingers,
carry us cool, carry your blue to our homes.
White spring winds, come off the bag-wool clouds,
come off the running melted snow, come white
as the arms of snow-born children.
Gray fighting winter winds, come along on the tearing
blizzard tails, the snouts of the hungry
hunting storms, come fighting gray in winter.
Winds of the Windy City,
Winds of corn and sea blue,
Spring wind white and fighting winter gray,
Come home here—they nickname a city for you.
The wind of the lake shore waits and wanders.
The heave of the shore wind hunches the sand piles.
The winkers of the morning stars count out cities
And forget the numbers.
***
For those non-Americans who may read this post, the Windy City is Chicago. Sandburg lived in Chicago for a while, around 1915, and the poem “Chicago” is one that I think is in every American Lit book:
Chicago
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders;
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your
painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have
seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women
and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my
city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be
alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall
bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted
against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his
ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked,
sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.
I think, when I started doing poetry posts, that I said I don’t much care for free verse. Having done a fair number of poetry posts by this point, I can now say that this turns out not to be true. I love some free verse.
I definitely said, in a Quora answer recently, that self-published modern “free verse” poetry generally strikes me as lazy pseudopoetry; if you’re just writing boring sentences and throwing in random line breaks, that’s not poetry. I said, if somebody seriously wants to write free verse, then they should start by writing a few hundred sonnets and thus develop a feel for language, rhythm, word choice, all of that. Then they can write free verse if that’s where their heart lies.
Beats me if Carl Sandburg ever wrote a sonnet, but he sure wrote great free verse. Next time, I may say, Or go read poems by Sandburg and other poets who wrote excellent free verse poetry and think about language, rhythm, and word choice.
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I think of ‘little cat feet’ every time my cats thunder up and down the stairs like a herd of bison.
I remember reading his biography of Lincoln (not the whole thing!) and being amazed at the sense of space he managed to impart, and just how beautiful the whole book (what I read of it!) was, and how incredible that is was published in something like 1900. As your post shows, he’s a lot more than ‘little cat feet’.
To me, that last poem looks less like free verse than it does a chiasmus, which is a Hebrew form of poetry. It’s ideas stacked in an abcde e’d’c’b’a’ form, to emphasize the middle point. He doesn’t quite have the form perfectly; if so, the ideas repeated at beginning and end would be in reverse order, but it’s pretty close. You see it all over in the Old Testament, especially in Isaiah.
That said, I love all of these poems, free verse or not. Thanks so much for introducing me to so many poets I didn’t know – and giving me a chance to revisit old favorites!
You made me laugh, Ann! You’re so right about the “herd of bison” sound effects!
I didn’t know he’d written a biography of Lincoln–I’ll have to look it up and see how gigantic it is!
Thanks, EC–if I ever knew what a chiasmus was, I’d forgotten. That’s really neat to know about.
Enjoyed rereading these poems quite a lot. Thanks for reminding me about them. I’m thinking it might be time for a review of my Norton poetry anthologies which is where I first ran into Sandberg sandwiched between Langston Hughes and e.e. cummings.