Softening a City's Hard Edge... and Ours

He received the Pulitzer Prize more than once, compiled folk songs, wrote an acclaimed biography of Lincoln, and was a poet. His name is Carl Sandburg. He is pretty much forgotten now. Three of his poems, however, have retained some recognition for their enduring evocativeness, and one of them for its perceptiveness.  And two of those three poems have to do with the healing power of Nature.

In "Chicago," Sandburg portrays that city as it was a century ago. He describes it as a "City of Big Shoulders," but this is not necessarily an attractive bulked-up city.  Along with references to gunmen, whores, and hunger, the poet says to the city, "They tell me you are wicked and I believe them...."  The only way Sandburg is able to defend this city is to admire its brashness as being "the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth."

A quite different atmosphere is evoked by the very brief poem "Fog."  In the center line of this poem, a city is again referred to, with the simple phrase "harbor and city."  But there is no roughness experienced this time.  That is because that line of the poem -- and the city itself -- become surrounded by softening fog.  That gift from Nature is so quiet and gentle that it "comes on little cat feet."

A third poem (and one with greater depth of thought than the other two) is Sandburg's "Grass." Here, the healing power of Nature is made explicit.  It is a power that can not only soften visibly the sharp edges of a city but also heal human grief.  Published in 1918, the opening lines of "Grass" mention cities that were the sites of large battles in the just-ended World War I, in the Civil War, and in the Napoleonic Wars.  The poet knows what was the shared consequence of all those wars, because before each place-name, the instructions are given:

"Pile the bodies high....

Shovel them under...."

However, there is also that element of Nature -- the element not created by those human hands that made war.  That other element speaks:

"... let me work --

I am the grass; I cover all."

The poem predicts that in ten years, when the train passes by, the passengers will no longer be able to recognize the spot, because the grass will have done its healing work, covering all.

From our vantage point today, we know that the brash, adolescent Chicago of Sandburg's 1914 poem "Chicago" did not grow into a model of beauty.  About a half-century later, it had become devastated by the legacy of racism, white flight, massive decaying ghettos, and riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.  Nevertheless, in recent years, a new generation of city leadership has led the way in the creation of rooftop gardens on the top of city hall and downtown buildings.  Those people apparently knew -- as did the poet Carl Sandburg almost a century before -- that plants can have a healing touch for body and soul.

~~~

Have you experienced a way that Nature eases a city or human roughness?

(Sandburg's poems can be found in various anthologies.  I took them from

 The Harper American Literature,  ed. Donald McQuade, et al.  © 1987.

  You can read them on-line at Selected Poems of Carl Sandburg [1926].)