Compare And Contrast At The Bomb Testing Site

Told from the perspective of sentient grass, Carl Sandburg’s poem brings forth an almost eerie feeling of the perseverance of nature. Whilst humanity has been battling out wars ever since the dawn of time, rapidly increasing in both strength and resulting casualties, a subject further proven by the second poem, William E. Stafford’s At the Bomb Testing Site. How great of an impact has the presence of mankind had on a planet, otherwise so rich in life? Will we ultimately end up victims of our own destructive ways?

The two poems are similar in the way that they are both products of authors who has experienced war, or an ever-looming threat of war erupting. But whereas Sandburg has a quite direct approach towards his subject, Stafford has chosen

a path riddled with metaphors. There is an example right at the very start of Grass, which further validates the theory: “Pile the bodies high […] I am the grass; I cover all.”, it would seem fair to argue that the text, although powerful, is more direct and without the many layers of hidden meaning.
At the Bomb Testing Site is rather on the opposite side of that scale.

Stafford seems to have chosen his words with care, and that has in effect increased the magnitude of its content. A single word can have multiple layers of meaning, as is the case with history; is the lizard simply witnessing history, or is it in fact a witness to man making history; perfecting and growing the atomic bomb? Another prominent feature which Stafford has bestowed upon this lizard, is its human-like qualities, making it relatable to us. He can tell that in addition to being able to process thought, the lizard is both “tense” and “[he is] panting”, features hardly ever characterized by lizards, outside of animated

movies.
The lizard is “watching the curve of a particular road, as if something might happen”, implying that what might happen is most likely going the be brought on by humans; the ones who build unnatural structures. In sentence no. 5: “It was looking at something farther off than people could see”, it further validates the author’s views, in regards to how he portrays a world, in which a “little lizard” is, at the same time, “bigger than man”; that man in his search for power and control, has lost his connection to nature and therefore his ways.
Stafford’s choice of writing in a metaphorical language works great in the context of his text, and if it were not for the title of his poem, it would seem an almost impossible text to analyse. But the last paragraph starts off with: “There was just a continent without much on it, under a sky that never cared less”, further implying the beliefs that the text is in fact a protest poem, or rather an anti-war poem, arguing against the a-bomb. The continent refers to the vast deserts of Nevada, which of course was the hot seat of nuclear bomb tests in the US, during the first half of twentieth century history.
If the lizard, along with the other occurring natural elements in this text, is in fact a metaphor describing nature, then sentence no. 11: “Ready for a change, the elbows waited.” could hint towards nature patiently awaiting a positive change in human history, but with its “hands [gripping] hard on the desert” whilst it awaits change, it is in fact instead, experiencing the massive force of a nuclear explosion.
With what has been argued in this essay, there is valid reason to believe that these two poems are anti-war texts of their era.

Grass was written and published in 1918, at the end of the first World War, and is heavily influenced by that. “[Piling] the bodies high” and “[shovelling] them under […]” portrays a vivid and gruesome picture of death on an unimaginable massive scale. At the Bomb Testing Site on the other hand, was published in 1960, at the peak of the test runs of the US atomic bomb, and is in turn heavily influenced by its context. The overhanging threat of imminent nuclear war is a general undertone of his poem, mostly set right at the beginning with its title.

Putting the two poems up against one another does, then, prove quite interesting. They are similar in the way that they both put shame to the history of man, and that they deal with war in the grandest sense of the word, but at the same time they completely differ in regards to what type of war is portrayed, due to the contextual situation surrounding the authors during their respective time periods. WW1 has since been viewed by many historians as the last “real war”; one fought in trenches and by man-to-man combat, a portrayal further confirmed by the sheer size of body piles portrayed by Sandburg in his

text.
I do however, feel that Sandburg ends his poem on a more positive note. As previously stated: humanity has been battling out wars between ourselves, and other species, since we first came to be, but nature has persisted through all. Going back to nuclear bomb testing sites twenty or thirty years later, will prove nature finds a way. I do therefore feel, after analysing these two poems, that man is awful. He is great and has succeeded in incredible ways, but is at the same time destructive and as proven by history: awful. But although he is, we should not lose hope, for if man ends up exterminated, as a victim to his own destructive ways, then I would argue that, strictly in a philosophical sense, it would indeed be a beautiful sight to behold, if nature were to retake her planet and re-establish the natural harmonious balance of life.