Carl Sandburg's Use of Allusion in Grass

556 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: On poetry and history

Carl Sandburg's Use of Allusion in "Grass"

Carl Sandburg's short poem "Grass" represents a metaphor for the disguise of history. The persona tells how histories that have taken place are sooner or later disregarded. The persona tells that the histories should not be disregarded, but be left the way it is as cited in the poem "I am the grass .Let me work." People should notice the events that took place and learn from their mistakes and be better people. The places that are mentioned in the poem are allusions. The allusions are indirect references that Carl Sandburg utilizes to exhibit the seriousness of the past events.

Every place that is mentioned in the poem is a well-known bloody fight in wars that claimed many lives. The opening stanza of the poem is a command from the grass to soldiers at war in Austerlitz and Waterloo to kill as many people as they can and shovel them under the grass so that it has enough history to pile under itself and wipe out all the marks of combat. Austerlitz is a village where on Dec. 2, 1805; Napoleon escorted an outnumbered French army to vic...

Show More
Related

  • Philip Larkin And Wilfred Owen: Common Misconception Of War

    102 Words  | 1 Pages

    There are many things in this world that are impossible to understand without first hand experience.This can be especially irritating for people who have the knowledge, but see everyone else with the wrong idea. Philip Larkin and Wilfred Owen show this in their poems about the common misconception of war glorification. Through imagery and the use of similes, they explain what it's really like for a person to go into battle. To outsiders, fighting in war is a noble cause worthy of envy and praise, but from the inside perspective the only thing war does is take away the innocence of

    Read More

  • Analysis Of The Poem 'Dulce Et Decorum Est'

    602 Words  | 2 Pages

    ...are a repeat of the title, and also and added line to clarify the actual meaning of the poem. Owen mocks the idea of war being an honorable and nationalistic way to support ones country as he describes a situation in which death is detailed in gruesome detail. This poem is harsh, yet effective in displaying the acts of war and the affect the it has on all of the people involved, especially the foot soldiers who served in the front line, the trenches.

    Read More

  • Beach Burial

    454 Words  | 1 Pages

    This poem dwells heavily on the problems in war. It describes how high the death toll is for both sides. Slessor uses “convoys of dead sailors” to show that all these dead body’s are very much alike, with their movements and feelings being the same. It also outlines a major problem in war, being able to identify and bury they dead properly. "And each cross, the driven stake of tide-wood, bears the last signature of m...

    Read More

  • How are differing attitudes to war expressed in the poetry of WWI

    1250 Words  | 3 Pages

    trumpets do not call. The poet is trying to make the start of war a

    Read More

  • The Importance Of Allusion In Literature

    1039 Words  | 3 Pages

    To better a story or emphasize a point, authors sometimes use allusions that involve references to myths or classical texts. Allusion is an imperative part of understanding literature because they give us an unfathomable understanding of an author 's message. An author can carefully draw upon allusions to give a story, poem, or other works of literature from more meaning or to provide clues about the author 's message. The most familiar are Greek and Roman myths. The Greeks and Romans had an abundance of gods and goddesses in common, but the Roman name often differed from the Greek name. Gods and goddesses are often alluded to in other pieces of literature. Writers sometimes condense big ideas or intricate emotional issues by referring to a

    Read More

  • Free College Essays - Imagery, Metaphors, and Diction in Dulce et Decorum Est

    572 Words  | 2 Pages

    The images drawn in this poem are so graphic that it could make readers feel sick. For example, in these lines: "If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood/ Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs/ Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud,"(21-23) shows us that so many men were brutally killed during this war. Also, when the gas bomb was dropped, "[s]omeone still yelling out and stumbling/ [a]nd flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.../ [h]e plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning."(11-12,16) These compelling lines indicate that men drowned helplessly in the toxic gasses. These graphic images are very disturbing but play a very effective role in the development of the poem.

    Read More

  • The Falling Soldier Poem Analysis

    781 Words  | 2 Pages

    The poem comprises three stanzas which are patterned in two halves; the rule of three is ingeniously used throughout the poem to create tension and show the progression of the soldiers’ lives. There is a variety of rhyming schemes used – possibly Duffy considered using caesural rhyme, internal rhyme and irregular rhyme to better address the elegiac reality. The rhythm is very powerful and shows Duffy’s technical adroitness. It is slightly disconcerting, and adds to the other worldly ambience of the poem. Duffy uses a powerful comparative in each stanza to exemplify the monstrosity and extent of war, which is much worse than we imagine; it develops throughout each stanza, starting with a syntactical ‘No; worse.’ to ‘worse by far’ and ending on ‘much worse’. Similarly, the verbs used to describe the soldier’s shadow as he falls shows the reader the journey of the shadow, as if it’s the trajectory of soldiers’ lives. At first, the shadow is as an act...

    Read More

  • Criticism And Symbolism In David Berman's Self-Portrait At 28

    1682 Words  | 4 Pages

    One of the most repeated symbols in this poem is the image of the hill. It is repeated in four stanzas. In the first stanza of the poem, the hill is mentioned as “the ideal of Virginia brochured with goldenrod and loblolly” (2-3). This hill is specifically in Virginia and is the image looks like something that is on a brochure with beautiful nature. The hill is mentioned again in the second stanza: “It is a certain hill the one I imagine when I hear the word “hill”...and this hill would be still beautiful” (1-2, 5-7). There is an obvious image of a hill that the persona is depicting. Hills in general have a top and a bottom. I believe that the hill in this poem represents the ups and downs of the persona’s life and how the persona depicts the hill as beautiful lends to him being optimistic about life. Berman writes about the hill again in the fifth part of the poem: “The hill out my window is still looking beautiful suffused in a kind of gold national park light” (300-301). The last mention of the hill is in the twenty third stanza the first two lines read: “I walked out of the hill behind our house which looks positively Alaskan today”. The hill is now mostly covered with snow due to the Alaskan mention. You cannot tell what the hill looks like with the snow covering it, which represents how the persona feels about his life. Another symbol is the persona’s dogs. Dogs are normally symbolized as being kind and loving animals, a man’s best friend. The second stanza of part five is: “I’m watching my dog have nightmares, twitching and whining on the office floor and I try to imagine what beast has cornered him in the meadow where his dreams are set”. This stanza represents that the persona as a young person. The persona feels that he has not lived out his dreams yet, but he cannot achieve them because he is not happy. The dog is again mentioned: “but I was with our young dog and he was running through the tall grass like running

    Read More

  • Planting A Sequeia By Dana Gioia Summary

    722 Words  | 2 Pages

    The first stanza does not reveal much about the content of the poem but gives the mood and the setting. Dana Gioia makes use of strong sensory imagery to set a gloomy and negative atmosphere and lets the reader know that he has situated the poem on the North West coast of the United States. Although he has not yet revealed the content of the poem, he uses figurative imagery to symbolize death “Of and old

    Read More

  • Analysis of a Horses by Edwin Muir

    868 Words  | 2 Pages

    The poem begins with the poet transcending reality and reminiscing of one of his childhood memories. In this case it is one of when he as a child, watched a team of horses ploughing the stubble back into the field, during a rainy day which got progressively stormier. In the first two verses, the poet gives the reader a meaningful hint. what the circumstances of his times were. This was most probably the case.

    Read More

  • Channel Firing: The Violent Human Condition

    842 Words  | 2 Pages

    The poem is broken up into nine stanzas, each containing four lines. The rhyme scheme of the first stanza is abab format. The rhyme scheme continues the back-and-forth rhyme, eventually ending with a qrqr rhyme scheme for the very last stanza. The rhyme scheme continues without repetition outside of each stanza. This leaves the poem without a sense of resolution. Just as the rhyme scheme never comes to a concluding couplet, the guns never stop, even as the dead men lay down in their coffins once again. The perpetual need for war and bloodshed is as ongoing as the rhyme scheme, ever changing with new advances. Humans grow and adapt to war, making it more violent than before. This continuous growth is shown through the abab scheme as it makes it’s way through the different letters of the alphabet. The setup is similar however the rhyming, and resources, differ from each stage prior and after. The violence will not end until God blows the trumpet; which he admits he may never

    Read More

  • The Harsh Reality of War in Wilfred Owen’s Poem Dulce et Decorum Est

    1056 Words  | 3 Pages

    Chaos and drudgery are common themes throughout the poem, displayed in its form; it is nearly iambic pentameter, but not every line fits the required pattern. This is significant because the poem’s imperfect formulation is Owen making a statement about formality, the poem breaks the typical form to show that everything is not functioning satisfactorily. The poem’s stanza’s also begin short, but become longer, like the speaker’s torment and his comrades movement away from the open fire. The rhyming scheme of ABABCDCD is one constant throughout the poem, but it serves to reinforce the nature of the cadence as the soldiers tread on. The war seems to drag on longer and longer for the speaker, and represents the prolonged suffering and agony of the soldier’s death that is described as the speaker dwells on this and is torn apart emotionally and distorts his impressions of what he experiences.

    Read More

  • A Young Warrior Poem

    754 Words  | 2 Pages

    The poem shows that the young man grows up to become a fighter who does not know when to stop all in the matter of a few lines that amount to one sentence. Then in an even shorter sentence, he dies in combat. Writing this as two sentences accentuates the idea that life is short, but can even be shorter if we can not get along. The speaker’s mourning tone probably ponders if the man avoided fighting maybe he could have lived longer as suggested when mentioning killing war elephants were not enough for the man who immersed himself in the battleground. By putting oneself in an environment of anger and aggression to the point of a questionable noticing of an arrow inside of oneself can only lead to a shortened

    Read More

  • Walt Whitman Biography

    1247 Words  | 3 Pages

    ... the faces of the dead and dying, pierced the joyful heart that was Walt Whitman. These experiences Lead to a new book of poetry added to “Leaves of Grass”. “Drum Taps,” contains 43 poems of the glory and tragedy of war. When before he wrote of voices singing in unison, he now questioned, would this song of unity be stifled forever? “Year that trembled and reel’d beneath me! Your summer wind is warm enough, yet the air I breathed froze me, A thin gloom fell through the sunshine and darken’d me, Must I change my triumphant song? said I to myself, Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled? And sullen hymns of defeat?(Leaves of Grass, 261)

    Read More

  • Walt Whitman Style Analysis

    1067 Words  | 3 Pages

    ...e who are killed at war were usually buried at the battle field in which they died in. Whitman wrote, “I rose from the chill ground and folded my soldier well in his blanket, And buried him where he fell.” (25) Overall, Whitman does a great job of portraying the honest brutality and depressive nature of war, especially the Civil War, where it was a battle between countries. The personification of the Civil War was a great touch and a fitting addition to Whitman’s poem. The gloom of the war and subject matter of course, offered the reader a glimpse of what was to come of the narrator. The war gave every soldier the stark feeling of hopelessness at times, though the bonds they made with each other were what got them through the rigors of war. Now that the narrator’s comrade was dead, the poem’s tone gave the idea to the reader that the soldier had little to fight for.

    Read More

More about Carl Sandburg's Use of Allusion in Grass

Open Document