What is the main idea of Grass by Carl Sandburg?

Q: What is the message of grass by Carl Sandburg?

Carl Sandburgs poem Grass is a call to remember the wars of the past, the battles lost and won, the lives and the scars that are affected—and created—by war.

Q: What is the main idea of the poem grass?

Grass by Carl Sandburg is a deeply moving poem that addresses the horrors of war and human kinds responsibility to never forget them. In the first lines of Grass, the speaker, grass, asks that it be allowed to do its job and cover up the bodies and history soaked battlefields around the world.

Q: What is the poem grass will grow about?

In the poem Grass Will Grow” Kariara talks of a different kind of violence. The violence Kariara tries to address in this poem is that which comes with madness. This madness according to the poet results from deflowering the pure culture of the persona.

Q: What type of poem is grass by Carl Sandburg?

Grass is written in free verse, which means that it doesnt have a regular rhyme scheme or meter. Carl wasnt interested in writing in forms like sonnets, villanelles, or even haikus. Our poet aimed to write in natural, straightforward language, and didnt want to be weighed down by lots of poetry rules.

             In his poem "Grass", Carl Sandburg emphasizes the need to remember
             the people who have died in war for the cause of freedom and chastises
             those who go about their daily lives taking their freedom for granted. The
             straightforward statements in the poem portray the author's disappointment
             of those who would forget, and Sandburg implores the reader to remember
             those lives lost in conflict. Sandburg uses personification and gives the
             grass human qualities to convey the reader that grass acts as a cover up of
             all the deaths, destruction and other historical memories. The poem
             illustrates how war is a destructive force through its strong imagery,
             repetition and personification of the grass.
             Sandburg starts the poem off with "Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz
             and Waterloo" (Sandburg). The word "pile" grabs the reader's attention and
             gives the reader a strong image of dead corpses piled on top of each other.
             Also, the words "Austerlitz" and "Waterloo" show us that this destructive
             force of war effects places all over the world. The random grouping of
             these battles suggests that the destruction can be from any battle, any
             place, and any time. As the poem continues he builds on this idea even
             further, "And pile them high at Ypres/ And pile them high at Verdun"
             (Sandburg). We can see the destruction was done by an unnatural form
             because of the collection of dead bodies. The reader can now see that the
             word "pile" is a verb, not a noun, and an order at that. At the end of the
             poem he writes, "I am the grass/ Let me work" (Sandburg). This shows us
             that the horrific deeds of war all seem eradicated by nature's gentle work.
             Grass covers all, in time, but the destruction and devastation of war
             should never be forgotten by those who were affected.
             Although the destruction and devastation shown through this poem
             should be enough to set the mood for the readers, Sandburg uses free verse
             to mimic or...

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What is the message of grass by Carl Sandburg?
What is the main idea of the poem grass?
What is the poem grass will grow about?
What type of poem is grass by Carl Sandburg?

This poem takes a peculiar perspective on the war, whereby the human perspective is decentred, placed to one side. The nature of ‘Grass’ is not the nature of the pastoral poets, who take nature as a part of the human experience— a mirror or setting for man’s dramatic struggles. Nature in ‘Grass’ is non-human, unsympathetic, almost alien. Focussing on the grass rather than the men fighting in the war necessarily belittles man- for the purpose, here, of showing his pettiness and violence.

STRUCTURE NOTE: This poem is unusually structured. It is an example of free verse, which refuses the rules of metre and rhyme for a more conversational voice. It’s three stanza’s unusual layout, however, do invite speculation. Are the shorter lines ‘buried’ under the longer ones, as the bodies are under the grass?

Carl Sandburg: Sandburg was an American poet from an impoverished background who served for 8 months in the US army during the Spanish-American War of 1898. He first published as a poet in 1904, and wrote the rest of his life. Sandburg died in 1967.

Grass: This poem personifies grass, which directly addresses the reader. It is a striking tactic in writing a war poem. Grass, of course, shares some things in common with human beings: it lives and dies in abundance. Yet it is far more abundant than human beings, and its omnipresence makes man peripheral: to the extent that the grass personified in this poem is dismissive of man. Grass has religious and literary roots as a symbol for transience too. Isaiah 40:6 declares “All flesh is grass”, that is, nothing human lasts (when compared to the eternal nature of God): and it is interesting that Sandburg uses grass, personified, to explore the transience of man. The American poet Walt Whitman (an influence on Sandburg’s work) self-deprecatingly adopted the title ‘Leaves of Grass’ for his most famous collection, alluding to the possible transience of the poems printed on the leaves within.

“Pile the bodies high…”: The unsympathetic perspective of grass is immediately established. There is a lack of understanding here of the meaning of death for humans. Grass is everywhere, and while life remains on Earth, seemingly eternal, given the long time scales of evolution.

“…Austerlitz and Waterloo… Gettysburg… Ypres and Verdun.”: All famous battles with large amounts of dead. Austerlitz (1805) was fought by Napoleon against the Russians and Austrians; Waterloo (1816) by the British against Napoleon; Gettysburg by the North and South in the US civil war; and Ypres (1914-17) and Verdun (1916) were the scenes of recurring battles throughout World War One.

“Shovel them under and let me work”: Grass has no sympathy for the dead, nor those who grieve for them. The impassive word ‘shovel’ seems important here, replacing the more humane term, ‘bury’. The bodies will sustain the grass. The ‘work’ it does is to cover the ground: “I cover all.” The grass covers the dead like a shroud; it cover’s man’s shame.

“Two years, ten years…”: There is a carelessness about dates here that tells of the different timescales that nature works in.

“passengers ask the conductor…”: this almost has an ecological message to it: men are the passengers, nature is the conductor. The tone here is facetious, conversational, making human concerns seem laughably trivial: “What place is this? / Where are we now?” The conductor does not answer. The grass simply says, “I am the grass. / Let me work.”

[ANTHOLOGY NOTE: This is the first of two poems which decentre human perspectives on the war through nature. These are unusual and rather brave selections.]

What is the message of grass by Carl Sandburg?

Carl Sandburg's poem "Grass" is a call to remember the wars of the past, the battles lost and won, the lives and the scars that are affected—and created—by war.

What is the main idea of the poem grass?

'Grass' by Carl Sandburg is a deeply moving poem that addresses the horrors of war and human kind's responsibility to never forget them. In the first lines of 'Grass,' the speaker, grass, asks that it be allowed to do its job and cover up the bodies and history soaked battlefields around the world.

What is the poem grass will grow about?

In the poem “Grass Will Grow” Kariara talks of a different kind of violence. The violence Kariara tries to address in this poem is that which comes with madness. This madness according to the poet results from deflowering the pure culture of the persona.

What type of poem is grass by Carl Sandburg?

"Grass" is written in free verse, which means that it doesn't have a regular rhyme scheme or meter. Carl wasn't interested in writing in forms like sonnets, villanelles, or even haikus. Our poet aimed to write in natural, straightforward language, and didn't want to be weighed down by lots of poetry rules.