Harvest Poems

1910–1960

Carl Sandburg

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780544784000
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

The great American poet's essential collection spanning fifty years of verse—with an introduction by Mark Van Doren.
With major contributions in the realms of journalism, biography and children's fiction, Carl Sandburg was a luminary of twentieth-century American literature. But he was first a foremost a poet who transformed the diversity of his experience into powerfully vivid and beloved verse. His many collections won numerous accolades, including two Pulitzer Prizes.
This selection of Sandburg's poems is culled from half a century of output and includes thirteen poems appearing in book form for the first time. As this collection so masterfully demonstrates, "[Sandburg's poetry] is independent, honest, direct, lyric, and it endures, clamorous and muted, magical as life itself" ( New York Times).

From The People, Yes

For sixty years the pine lumber barn

had held cows, horses, hay, harness, tools, junk,

amid the prairie winds of Knox County, Illinois

and the corn crops came and went, plows and wagons,

and hands milked, hands husked and harnessed

and held the leather reins of horse teams

in dust and dog days, in late fall sleet

till the work was done that fall.

And the barn was a witness, stood and saw it all.

“That old barn on your place, Charlie,

was nearly falling last time I saw it,

how is it now?”

“I got some poles to hold it on the east side

and the wind holds it up on the west.”

---

In a Colorado graveyard

two men lie in one grave.

They shot it out in a jam over who owned

One corner lot: over a piece of real estate

They shot it out: it was a perfect duel.

Each cleansed the world of the other.

Each horizontal in an identical grave

Had his bones cleansed by the same maggots.

They sleep now as two accommodating neighbors.

They had speed and no control.

They wanted to go and didn’t know where.

---

A father sees a son nearing manhood.

What shall he tell that son?

“Life is hard; be steel; be a rock.”

And this might stand him for the storms

and serve him for humdrum and monotony

and guide him amid sudden betrayals

and tighten him for slack moments.

“Life is a soft loam; be gentle; go easy.”

And this too might serve him.

Brutes have been gentled where lashes failed.

The growth of a frail flower in a path up

has sometimes shattered and split a rock.

A tough will counts. So does desire.

So does a rich soft wanting.

Without rich wanting nothing arrives.

Tell him too much money has killed men

and left them dead years before burial:

the quest of lucre beyond a few easy needs

has twisted good enough men

sometimes into dry thwarted worms.

Tell him time as a stuff can be wasted.

Tell him to be a fool every so often

and to have no shame over having been a fool

yet learning something out of every folly

hoping to repeat none of the cheap follies

thus arriving at intimate understanding

of a world numbering many fools.

Tell him to be alone often and get at himself

and above all tell himself no lies about himself

whatever the white lies and protective fronts

he may use amongst other people.

Tell him solitude is creative if he is strong

and the final decisions are made in silent rooms.

Tell him to be different from other people

if it comes natural and easy being different.

Let him have lazy days seeking his deeper motives.

Let him seek deep for where he is a born natural.

Then he may understand Shakespeare

and the Wright brothers, Pasteur, Pavlov,

Michael Faraday and free imaginations

bringing changes into a world resenting change.

He will be lonely enough

to have time for the work

he knows as his own.

---

On the shores of Lake Michigan

high on a wooden pole, in a box,

two purple martins had a home

and taken away down to Martinique

and let loose, they flew home,

thousands of miles to be home again.

And this has lights of wonder

echo and pace and echo again.

The birds let out began flying

north north-by-west north

till they were back home.

How their instruments told them

of ceiling, temperature, air pressure,

how their control-boards gave them

reports of fuel, ignition, speeds,

is out of the record, out.

Across spaces of sun and cloud,

in rain and fog, through air pockets,

wind with them, wind against them,

stopping for subsistence rations,

whirling in gust and spiral,

these people of the air,

these children of the wind,

had a sense of where to go and how,

how to go north north-by-west north,

till they came to one wooden pole,

till they were home again.

And this has lights of wonder

echo and pace and echo again

for other children, other people, yes.

The red ball of the sun in an evening mist

Or the slow fall of rain on planted fields

Or the pink sheath of a newborn child

Or the path of a child’s mouth to a nipple

Or the snuggle of a bearcub in mother paws

Or the structural weave of the universe

Witnessed in a moving frame of winter stars—

These hold affidavits of struggle.

---

The people is Everyman, everybody.

Everybody is you and me and all others.

What everybody says is what we all say.

And what is it we all say?

Where did we get these languages?

Why is your baby-talk deep in your blood?

What is the cling of the tongue

To what it heard with its mother-milk?

They cross on the ether now.

They travel on high frequencies

Over the border-lines and barriers

Of mountain ranges and oceans.

When shall we all speak the same language?

And do we want to have all the same language?

Are we learning a few great signs and passwords?

Why should Everyman be lost for words?

The questions are put every day in every tongue:

“Where you from, Stranger?

Where were you born?

Got any money?

What do you work at?

Where’s your passport?

Who are your people?”

Over the ether crash the languages.

And the people listen.

As on the plain of Howdeehow they listen.

They want to hear.

They will be told when the next war is ready.

The long wars and the short wars will come on the air.

How many got killed and how the war ended

And who got what and the price paid

And how there were tombs for the Unknown Soldier,

The boy nobody knows the name of.

The boy whose great fame is that of the masses.

The millions of names too many to write on a tomb.

The heroes, the cannonfodder, the living targets.

The mutilated and sacred dead.

The people, yes.

Two coun...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Introduction by Mark Van Doren
• From Notes for a Preface
• New Poems
• Now They Bury Her Again
• Men of Science Say Their Say
• Name Us a King
• Red and White
• Sayings of Henry Stephens
• Air Circus
• Madison and 42nd
• Instructions
• Altgeld
• Waiting for the Chariot
• Was Ever a Dream a Drum?
• Under the Capitol Dome
• Isle of Patmos
• Chicago Poems
• Chicago
• Lost
• Happiness
• Mag
• Personality
• Limited
• Under a Hat Rim
• Child of the Romans
• Fog
• Killers
• Under the Harvest Moon
• Nocturne in a Deserted Brickyard
• Theme in Yellow
• Child
• Gone
• Under a Telephone Pole
• Cornhuskers
• From Prairie
• Laughing Corn
• Wilderness
• Fire-Logs
• Southern Pacific
• Buffalo Bill
• Prayers of Steel
• Psalm of Those Who Go Forth Before Daylight
• Cool Tombs
• Grass
• Smoke and Steel
• From Smoke and Steel
• Red-Headed Restaurant Cashier
• Clean Curtains
• The Hangman at Home
• Broken-Face Gargoyles
• Death Snips Proud Men
• Jazz Fantasia
• Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind
• Threes
• A. E. F.
• Sea-Wash
• Wind Song
• Night Stuff
• Haze
• For You
• Slabs of the Sunburnt West
• From The Windy City
• Washington Monument by Night
• Upstream
• At the Gates of Tombs
• Improved Farm Land
• Primer Lesson
• Good Morning, America
• Nine Tentative (First Model) Definitions of Poetry
• From Good Morning, America
• Baby Song of The Four Winds
• Blossom Themes
• Small Homes
• Sunsets
• Splinter
• A Couple
• Phizzog
• They Ask: Is God, Too, Lonely?
• Explanations of Love
• Maybe
• Foolish about Windows
• People of the Eaves, I Wish You Good Morning
• Snatch of Sliphorn Jazz
• The People, Yes
• From The People, Yes
• Complete Poems
• Glass House Canticle
• Freedom is a Habit
• The Long Shadow of Lincoln: A Litany
• When Death Came April Twelve 1945
• Number Man
• Boxes and Bags
• Arithmetic
• Little Girl, be Careful What You Say
• The Sandburg Range
• Brainwashing
• Sleep Impression
• Star Silver
• Consolation Sonata
• Psalm of the Bloodbank
• Man the Moon Shooter
• About the Author