Poetry Analysis: "Fire Dreams" by Carl Sandburg

Today, a day to be thankful for many reasons, the least of which for friends and family, good health, dignified and stimulating work, we celebrate Thanksgiving.  This is truly an American holiday.  Over the years I’ve posted various types of Thanksgiving messages.  I’ve posted George Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation that is the root of the holiday, and I posted a heartfelt statement of gratitude to all my blogger friends, past and present.  I’ve posted on St. Paul’s prayer of gratitude at the beginning of his epistle to the Romans, and I posted on part of the Eucharistic prayer of thankfulness in the Mass.  There are other posts.  If you type in “Thanksgiving” in the little search box in the upper left of the blog you will pull them all up.

This year I wanted to post a Thanksgiving poem, and there are quite a few out there to select from.  It was hard choosing but I chose one that from the title one would not guess is on Thanksgiving.  It’s “Fire Dreams” by Carl Sandburg.  

 

At the time of Carl Sandburg’s death (1967) the United States was 191 years old if you consider 1776 as the birthdate of the country.  Sandberg lived to 89 years old, and so had lived through nearly half of the country’s lifespan.  And since he was born in 1878, he lived through the formative years of the United States entering the world stage and becoming the leader of the free world.  Sandburg saw the nation’s urbanization, the Spanish-American War, the two World Wars, the Great Depression, the African-American migration, the development of American music in Broadway musicals, Jazz, Gospel, and Rock and Roll, and so much more.  He was a distinctly American poet and, perhaps more specifically, a Midwestern and Chicagoan poet.  He won numerous awards in his lifetime and along with Robert Frost may have been seen as the two Great American poets in their day.  Sandburg’s poetry does not have the modernist sensibility, and so perhaps his reputation has come down after his life.  Still his poetry speaks to us simply and directly, especially as Americans. 

 

 

Fire Dreams

By Carl Sandburg

 

(Written to be read aloud, if so be, Thanksgiving Day)

 

 

I remember here by the fire,

In the flickering reds and saffrons,

They came in a ramshackle tub,

Pilgrims in tall hats,

Pilgrims of iron jaws,

Drifting by weeks on beaten seas,

And the random chapters say

They were glad and sang to God.

 

And so

Since the iron-jawed men sat down

And said, “Thanks, O God,”

For life and soup and a little less

Than a hobo handout to-day,

Since gray winds blew gray patterns of sleet on Plymouth Rock,

Since the iron-jawed men sang “Thanks, O God,”

You and I, O Child of the West,

Remember more than ever

November and the hunter’s moon,

November and the yellow-spotted hills.

 

And so

In the name of the iron-jawed men

I will stand up and say yes till the finish is come and gone.

God of all broken hearts, empty hands, sleeping soldiers,

God of all star-flung beaches of night sky,

I and my love-child stand up together to-day and sing: “Thanks, O God.”

 

It should be noted, the poem has a proem, an introductory line that sets the tone for the poem.  The proem stipulates the poem should be read aloud on Thanksgiving Day.

The poem body is in three stanzas of varying number of lines.  The first stanza has eight lines, the second eleven, and the third six.  The lines are in free verse of varying length, what I would call Whitman-esk lines.  Sandburg seems to have an affinity for Walt Whitman.  This poem is a very akin to Walt Whitman.

The situation is set in the first two lines: the poet sitting by a fire recalling the pilgrims of Plymouth Rock.  The poet imagines their ship which he refers to as a “ramshackle tub,” imagines the pilgrims in “tall hats,” and repeated three more times in the poem as “iron-jawed.”  Significantly, the poet imagines the pilgrims thanking God for the success of their voyage.  This is from where the tile, “Fire Dreams” comes from.  The poet is by what I imagine is a campfire (or perhaps a fireplace) and has images of the pilgrims come to mind.

In the second stanza the poet imagines the initial assistance the pilgrims received as they settled in the country.  The lines that imagines the assistance is superb: “For life and soup and a little less/Than a hobo handout to-day.”  Twice in the stanza they thank God and twice their “iron-jaw” disposition is referenced.  Interestingly, never in the poem does Sandburg allude to the Native-Americans who were the complementary half to the pilgrims’ feast.  The poet mentions his “Child of the West,” which I take is his child, and tells the child to remember the month of November and its association with the hunt that will provide for Thanksgiving, 

The third stanza brings the memory to a climax where the poet and his child stand up and “in the name of the iron-jawed men” and praise God in gratitude.  The pilgrim’s “iron-jaw” is referenced once more.

Several poeticisms should be highlighted.  First the imagery of the pilgrims stands in the foreground—the imagery of their hats, their sea voyage, their ship, Plymouth Rock, and the weather, and of course the pilgrim’s iron-jaw.”  The humility of accepting a “hobo” meal is also visually distinct.  In contrast, the image of the poet and his child by the fire stands in the background, and it seems that in the third stanza when the poet and child are ready to express their thanks they step into the foreground to take center stage.  That is a nice effect.

Second, the language of the poem is very American.  Hobo is an Americanism which seems to date to 1889.  The poem was published in 1918, about thirty years from when “hobo” was coined.  “Iron-jaw” is another Americanism and coined a little earlier than “hobo.”  Iron-jaw was coined in 1880.  While “pilgrim” and “ramshackle” are not Americanism, they have become much more frequent in the American lexicon.  They do feel American. 

Finally the “s” sound predominates the poem, and it does so to great effect.  We see and hear if spoken aloud the “s” alliteration of the words: saffrons, seas, soup, since, sleet, sang, says, sleep, so, spotted, star, and I think I may have missed a few still.  That is quite an amount in such a short poem.  Even more remarkable is the frequent ending of the words with the “s” sound.  Notice all the plurals: pilgrims, saffron, reds, seas, jaws, and so on.  I’m not going to list them all but Sandburg seems to go out of his way to make words plural.  He also chooses words that naturally end with “s”: less, West, and most importantly, “Thanks.”  The cumulative effect of all the “s” sounds prepares the listener for the climactic moment when the poet and child “stand” together and “sing,” “Thanks, O God.”  All those “s” prior to the last line prepare the reader/listener for the poet to stand into the foreground and repeat the words from the pilgrim’s lips.

What a wonderful poem.

Happy Thanksgiving all!

Poetry Analysis; “October” by Robert Frost

Here is this lovely, relatively well-known poem from Robert Frost, “October,” perfect for this month of foliage.  First the poem, and I’ve included line numbers and segmented the poem into sections with lines.  I’ve also listed the rhyme scheme over to the right.

 

October

By Robert Frost

 

1 O hushed October morning mild,                            A

2 Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;                         B

3 Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,                               A

4 Should waste them all.                                             B

5 The crows above the forest call;                              B

6 Tomorrow they may form and go.                           C

7 O hushed October morning mild,                            A

8 Begin the hours of this day slow.                            C

9 Make the day seem to us less brief.                         D

10 Hearts not averse to being beguiled,                      A        

11 Beguile us in the way you know.                           C

12 Release one leaf at break of day;                           E

13 At noon release another leaf;                                 D

14 One from our trees, one far away.                         E

15 Retard the sun with gentle mist;                            F

16 Enchant the land with amethyst.                           F

17 Slow, slow!                                                            C

18 For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,                    B        

19 Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,            G                    

20 Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—             G        

21 For the grapes’ sake along the wall.                       B        

 

 

There is no mysterious theme to the poem.  It is what it seems, first and primary a meditation on the beautiful October foliage: “Enchant the land with amenthyst” (l. 16). One subtle theme is the slow movement of time, and the ever coming death that the change symbolizes: “Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild/Should waste them all” (3-4).  The poem is so static, it feels like a picture, but there is subtle movement.  The crows come and go (5-6) and the leaves fall ever so sporadically and one at a time over the course of a morning (12-24).  But the time is ever creeping slow: “Slow, slow!/For the grapes’ sake, if they were all” (17-18). 

What really intrigued me though was the form of the poem.  Does it have form?  It feels like it does.  The first quatrain (lines 1-4) has an ABAB rhyme scheme.  That anticipates form.  But the second quatrain (5-8) has a BCAC rhyme scheme, which does not follow the first quatrain.  The B rhyme harkens back to the first quatrain; a third rhyme, “C,” is introduced, and quatrain closes with to the very first “A” rhyme.  That does interlock, however asymmetrically. 

But what about the next quatrain?  If there were a third quatrain, the rhyme scheme would be DACE, which would not be a quatrain.  In fact, the syntax has it that a full period ends after three lines, and the following three lines is also a complete sentence.  Two three line groupings of a developed thought forms a sestet, six lines with an interlocking rhyme scheme.  If those six lines were a sestet, it would have the rhyme scheme of DACEDE.  The A and C echo back to the preceding two quatrains, the D and the E introduces new rhymes and interlock within the sestet with two E’s toward the end progressing the poem forward.  Again asymmetrical but the result is a static feel while moving the poem slowly forward. 

But wait, isn’t two quatrains followed by a sestet an Italian sonnet?  Yes, but a sonnet requires an iambic pentameter line, that is, ten syllables which consist of five two-syllable feet.  But all the poem’s lines are iambic tetrameter (eight syllables of four two-syllable feet) with two notable exceptions.  I’ll get to the exceptions in a bit.  So the first fourteen lines approximate a sonnet but it’s definitely not a sonnet.  

The following two lines (15-16) is a pure couplet of FF with no echo of the F rhyme anywhere else in the poem.  They don’t echo back and they don’t return.  The 17^th line is made up of two single-syllable words, “Slow, slow.”  Actually it’s one single-syllable word repeated.  And finally the last four lines return to a quatrain, only this time it is not an asymmetrical quatrain but a very symmetrical BGGB.  The internal rhyme of GG also does not echo anywhere else in the poem but the B sound which frames the quatrain harkens back to the first quatrain, which I think remarkably ties the poem together.

So what about the two non-conforming lines?  Line four is a four syllable iambic line (diameter), which is half the poem’s tetrameter lines.  To have just one diameter line in the midst of the tetrameter scheme is very odd, and again asymmetrical.  Because of its curtness, the line gives extra power to the death motif, “Should waste them all.”  The other non-conforming, “slow, slow,” isn’t even iambic.  It’s a spondee, two stressed syllables, and it gives extra power to the creeping temporal movement of the poem, reflecting the slow falling of the leaves.

Other observations I would like to point out.  (1) Lines one and seven repeat.  (2) All line ending words are single syllable except for amethyst.  (3) One word that ends a line is “frost,” the poet’s last name.  I’m not sure what to make of that last observation, but it is curious. 

So what are we to make of all this?  Opening asymmetrical quatrains but a closing symmetrical quatrain.  An asymmetrical sestet which with the quatrains ahead of it echoes an Italian sonnet, but a sonnet of improper line length.  Two lines that don’t follow the metrical scheme surrounded by 19 lines that do.  It is a poem that gives the appearance of fixed form but is highly non-conforming and, to repeat what I think is the most important observation of the poem’s form, asymmetrical. 

Here is what I think it means.  The asymmetrical form reflects the subject.  If you look at a wooded area in autumn, you see many colors of turning leaves, and they give the appearance of rhythmic form, but they are asymmetrically aligned.  It’s not that every other tree is yellow or that yellows and reds are in fixed repetition.  Two yellows may come at once but reds and browns alternate afterward.  It gives the appearance of harmony when you look at it as wide tapestry but it does not have a periodic cadence.  It seems balanced but it’s asymmetric!  Indeed it is harmonic but not in fixed repetition.  This is what Frost is capturing aesthetically, the woods in October.  That is the craft of a fine artist!

The pictures of the foliage are from the Staten Island Greenbelt, which is a conserved park.  I posted on a Father’sDay hike Matthew and I took in 2020.  It was spring time then.  It’s been a beautiful fall here this year.  Enjoy.