“Grass” by Carl Sanburg is a free verse poem that emphasizes war and the immortality of nature. The poem is about how grass commands humans to pile up the bodies high from the battles. As time passes and humans come and go, the speaker remains, constantly covering up the deceased. Throughout the entire poem, the speaker remains unsympathetic towards humanity and almost seems to carry a voice of irritation. The personification of grass and the allusions made to battles are used to express nature as a divine being, covering up the casualties of human intervention.
Carl Sanburg used personification in order to make grass the speaker of the poem to emphasize how insignificant humans are when compared to nature. In the poem,
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the speaker, grass, is shown to be a being of intelligence and of labor. The speaker states, “I am grass. I cover all” (Sanburg 3). It is important to note that the poem is in first person because it makes the audience aware that they are in the perspective of a being other than themselves. In this case, the grass represents nature’s perspective on human intervention. The speaker is like a mask. Even though it is clear that the speaker is grass, the grass’s purpose is that of a mask. It “cover all” like a mask would cover a face. It makes the landscape unidentifiable by covering all the death that happens from the wars waged by humans. The speaker states, “shovel them under and let me work” (Sandburg 2). The grass speaks largely on an imperative tense which reinforces the idea of grass as a superior being. The grass’ purpose is to hide death. It is beautiful on top but hides the ugly truth beneath it. It pays no heed to the identities and national of those who died in battle. Its sole purpose is to decompose the bodies that will eventually be forgotten in time. As time passes, the grass continuously covers up the consequences of wars. People perish while the grass still remains. This demonstrates nature as an immortal being, covering up the remains of human activity. Carl Sanburg used allusions from historical wars to demonstrate the recurring history of the chaos and destruction down by humans that nature covers up.
The speaker states, “Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo” (Sanburg 1). Austerlitz and Waterloo are two major battle in the Napoleonic War. The battle of Austerlitz took place in the Czech Republic and was a major victory for the Napoleon’s Army because he defeated three opposing armies in the battle. However, the Battle of Water marked the end of the twenty-year Napoleonic war for world domination. These two battles had completely different results. However, “Grass” uses these two battles as allusions to demonstrate that everything including most notorious conqueror, Napoleon, comes to an end. With either victories and defeat, nature will continue to cover everything. The poem also makes another war reference to Gettysburg and World War two. The speaker states, “And pile them high at Gettysburg/And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun” (Sanburg to 4-5). The battle of Gettysburg took place during the Civil War, but had the largest number of American casualties because the United States was fighting itself. The battles of Ypres and Verdun were both critical battles during World War II. There were five battles that took place at Ypres, but there is no clear winner. The battle of Verdun is known as the largest and longest battle in World War I. German forces advanced the furthest but fell back, so there was no definite winner from the battle. Not one soldier who died in the conflict is recognized and is only a number among the casualties. The soldiers sacrificed their own lives for the pursuit of nothing. It is important to note, the line “pile them high” is repeated every time a reference is made to a certain battle. The use of repetition of this line reinforces the idea of humans repeating history. Many lives were lost in these violent conflicts of humans trying to conquer one another, but
all these lives are left forgotten for the grass to cover them up. When compared to nature, human life is meaningless, repeating the same history of destruction and interference. When comparing humans to nature, nature is shown superior in “Grass.” Human life seems so short when compared to nature’s everlasting presence on earth. The poem states, “Two years, ten years, and the passengers ask the conductor:/What place is this?” (7-8). The subject shifts from past war conflicts to the future. Humans are now the one’s speaking, but they are using prerogative speech rather imperative speech the grass used. In the future, the battlefields are no longer recognizable because the fields that were once filled with bodies and debris will be covered in grass again. People who visit these battlefields do not even recognize the amount of death that occurred in a single place at a certain time. Nature covers the blemishes humans leave and make the land a place that grows life rather than a place of the decease. The speaker, again, states, “I am the grass./Let me work.” (Sanburg 10-11). Grass cares little for the affairs of humanity. Once the battles are over, the grass will go back to work, reclaiming these battlefields. Grass is unsympathetic to the deaths caused by humanity because it is a constant cycle that it sees all the time. Nature in the poem called “Grass” by Carl Sandburg views humans as inferior beings that hold no significance. Grass serves as the speaker and sees humans die constantly, but show little to no emotion. As time passes, the grass will cover it all, leaving nothing behind for people to remember. The battlefields would be as if no one died by the hands of another human. Nature covers the scars of the past with beautiful landscapes, but there will always be the forgotten bodies beneath. Humans will eventually be forgotten, but nature will always remain. Nature is hold the past, the present, and the future. Nature is beautiful on top, but it hides the dark past beneath its soil. Not everything that seems to be beautiful is pure; there is always a darkness that is hidden from plain sight.
...ntion of memories sweeping past, making it seem that the grass is bent by the memories like it is from wind. The grass here is a metaphor for the people, this is clear in the last line, “then learns to again to stand.” No matter what happens it always gets back up.
7. The personification in the second stanza is that she gives poems the ability to hide and are waiting to be found. The author states that poems are hiding in the bottom of your shoes, and they are the shadows drifting across your ceiling before you wake up. This is personification because she gives the poems traits that only a living organism can possess.
Specifically, the grandfather in this poem appears to represent involvement with nature because of his decisions to garden as he “stabs his shears into earth” (line 4). However, he is also representative of urban life too as he “watched the neighborhood” from “a three-story” building (line 10). The author describes the world, which the grandfather has a small “paradise” in, apart from the elements desecrated by humans, which include “a trampled box of Cornflakes,” a “craggy mound of chips,” and “greasy / bags of takeouts” (lines 23, 17, 2, and 14-15). The passive nature of the grandfather’s watching over the neighborhood can be interpreted in a variety of different ways, most of them aligning with the positive versus negative binary created by the authors of these texts. The author wants to show the reader that, through the grandfather’s complexity of character, a man involved in both nature and more human centered ways of life, there is multifaceted relationship that man and nature share. Through the also violent descriptions of the grandfather’s methods of gardening, the connection between destructive human activities and the negative effects on nature is
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...
He uses personifications specifically in this poem to write about what is going on and to describe things. “It's a hard life where the sun looks”(19)...”And its black strip of highway, big eyed/with rabbits that won’t get across ”(2)...”A pot bangs and water runs in the kitchen” (13) None of these are really human body parts on things such as the sun, a pot, or a highway, but they help describe what something does or what something looks like. In the first instance, the sun cannot actually look at something, but it could mean that the sun is visible to the humans, and if humans are out for a long time in the sun, they can get hot and exhausted. For the second line, the big-eyed highway could mean that the highway has many cars with bright headlights that are dangerous for the rabbits, the immigrants, to get across. For the third and final line, pots are not able to bang things on their own, and it could have possibly been a human who made the pot bang, preparing the meal of beans and brown soup that they survive on. There is also a simile in this poem, “Papa's field that wavered like a mirage” (24). This simile could suggest that the wind is moving the grass or crops on his father’s field and looked like an optical illusion. According to Gale Virtual Reference Library, the literary device, “tone” is used to convey the significant change of the author’s feeling in the poem. In the beginning lines, the tone is happy. The poem talks about nostalgia of when he was little, “They leap barefoot to the store. Sweetness on their tongues, red stain of laughter (5-6). (GVRL) These lines illustrate the nostalgia and happy times of Gary Soto’s life when he was probably a child. However, after line 11, the tone becomes more of a negative one. Soto later talks about Farm Laborers and how the job was not a great one. After line 19, a brighter
In the poem Grass, the speaker is assumed to be the Grass, a character, or entity of sorts, brought on by the writer. Carl Sanburg uses interrogative adverbs in order to further display the Grass’s view on humanity. Additionally, Sanburg includes the use of proper and concrete nouns to emphasize the Grass’s stability and recall violent military battles. Continually, the imperative verbs shown throughout the poem give the Grass its ultimate air of superiority. In Carl Sanburg’s poem Grass, he skillfully uses interrogative adverbs, proper and concrete nouns, and imperative verbs in order to convey a sense of superiority in the Grass, a result of brute-like human behavior throughout history.
Muir's poem could be seen to parallel Genesis(Old Testament),(Encyclopedia, Britannica, 2010). A good example of religious connotation of words, the seven days war, covenant, Eden and servitude, in the beginning and our father,' (Assignment, Book, 2008). When, Muir uses the word 'piled' in the sentence 'Dead bodies piled on the deck,' (Assignment, Book, 2008), One has the sensation that the poet wants to show the reader of the depth of disregard for the dead in the poem. It also clearly emphasises the chaos and destruction that the war has brought upon man and that there was no time for the simplest of burials. Muir, in being rhetorical, is showing that the survivors' need for a simpler life a purer life away from the existence of a technology driven society that caused the seven days war. The poem shows a strong sense of irony with, 'Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.' (Assignment Book, 2008).
Personification is an important theme throughout this poem. In lines 1-2 it says, “The mountain held the town as in a shadow I saw so much before I slept there once:.” Also in lines 3-4 it says, “I noticed that I missed stars in the west, where its black body cut into the sky.” This is an example of personification. In lines 5-6 it says, Near me it seemed: I felt it like a wall behind which i was sheltered from a wind.” Most of the examples showing personification in this poem, are displayed in the first couple of lines of the poem.
... poem becomes “the subjective Romantic spirit personified” (Zweig 243) who assumes a highly personal point of view. At the same time, the natural world also demonstrates equality between individuals and the idea of forming an equal society. For example, the grass which the speaker mentions presents this idea as it is a “uniform hieroglyphic” (Whitman 1) that grows “among black folks as among white” (Whitman 1), therefore implying the notion of egalitarianism.
Even if he grew up within nature, he didn’t really appreciate it until he became an adult. He is pantheistic; a belief that nature is divine, a God. Since he has religious aspect of nature, he believes that nature is everything and that it makes a person better. His tone in the poem is reproachful and intense. His poem purpose is to tell the readers and his loved ones that if he feels some kind of way about nature, then we should have the same feeling toward it as well.
The consistent pattern of metrical stresses in this stanza, along with the orderly rhyme scheme, and standard verse structure, reflect the mood of serenity, of humankind in harmony with Nature. It is a fine, hot day, `clear as fire', when the speaker comes to drink at the creek. Birdsong punctuates the still air, like the tinkling of broken glass. However, the term `frail' also suggests vulnerability in the presence of danger, and there are other intimations in this stanza of the drama that is about to unfold. Slithery sibilants, as in the words `glass', `grass' and `moss', hint at the existence of a Serpent in the Garden of Eden. As in a Greek tragedy, the intensity of expression in the poem invokes a proleptic tenseness, as yet unexplained.
... a much bigger picture such as a lawn. Whitman also shows the each of our self-identities are vital to the universal identities when he writes about growing among different races and groups. Again, he is telling us that even though we are our own entire person, we are equal. No man is greater than anyone else. Whitman shows his transcendentalism side here because to come to this conclusion that grass is so much more than just grass, he had to look deeper than his senses or his logical knowledge of grass. Sight, taste, touch, smell, or sound couldn’t have helped him answer the boy’s question. Taking classes on the importance of grass could not have accomplished this either. Whitman shows here that a person must look inside themselves and see what their soul is telling them because at times, it can provide infinitely more wisdom than a scholar or a book ever could.
In “I wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” William Wordsworth accomplishes his ideal of nature by using personification, alliteration, and simile within his poem to convey to the reader how nature’s beauty uplifts his spirits and takes him away from his boring daily routine. Wordsworth relates himself in solidarity to that of a cloud wandering alone, “I wandered lonely as a cloud” (line 1). Comparing the cloud and himself to that of a lonely human in low spirits of isolation, simultaneously the author compares the daffodils he comes across as he “floats on high o’er vales and hills” (line 2) to that of a crowd of people dancing (lines 3-6 and again in 12). Watching and admiring the dancing daffodils as he floats on by relating them to various beauties of
Figurative language is used by William Wordsworth to show the exchange between man and nature. The poet uses various examples of personification throughout the poem. When the poet says:”I wandered lonely as a cloud” (line 1),”when all at once I saw a crowd” (line 3), and “fluttering and dancing in the breeze” (line 6) shows the exchange between the poet and nature since the poet compares himself to a cloud, and compares the daffodils to humans. Moreover, humans connect with God through nature, so the exchange between the speaker and nature led to the connection with God. The pleasant moment of remembering the daffodils does not happen to the poet all time, but he visualizes them only in his “vacant or pensive mode”(line 20). However, the whole poem is full of metaphors describing the isolation of the speaker from society, and experiences the beauty of nature that comforts him. The meta...
As the poem progresses, the speaker’s attitude changes in (line 26), where he tells us that his mood is lowered. It is here that the speaker presents himself as “a happy child of earth” in (line 31); as once again Wordsworth... ... middle of paper ... ... / Of the unfinished sheepfold may be seen / Besides the boisterous brook of Greenhead Ghyll,” showing the growth of human beings in relative notion to nature.