Grass

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1918

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

Austerlitz, Waterloo, Gettysburg, Ypres, and Verdun

The battles that the “grass” mentions symbolize at once humanity’s propensity for war and its collective, willful ignorance, specifically its inability or refusal to learn war’s pointlessness.

For historians and military strategists, these battles from three different wars epitomize epic conflict. They embody the heroic ideal of one grand army pitted against another in a showdown over ideals, the defense of the values that define one nation against that which would destroy those values. For the poet, using the grass that will come to cover these grand soundstages for these grand battles reveals that these battles symbolize not heroic conflict but rather pointless brutality. After all, now nearly two centuries after the rise and fall of Napoleon and more than a century after the barbaric stalemate at Verdun, these battles that seemed titanic at the moment are little noted.

The steady work of the grass, upcycling battle sites into cow pastures and woodlands, only serves to help humanity forget the bloody realities of the battles and in turn tidy up the history that will be written, ensuring humanity’s continuing obsession with wars. Thus, these battles symbolize the fatal, endless repetition of history caused by humanity’s refusal to learn.

The Train Full of Passengers

Lines 7-9 are jarring because they lurch the poem into the future, when trains full of people will pull their way past the battlefield sites. There is a restrained contempt for humanity when the grass/speaker notes with bemusement how, once it has a chance to do its work and cover over the remnants of a battle and its casualties, train passengers moving past the battlefields will not even know something, anything, even happened there.

The poem does not mock these passengers who ask the conductor, “What place is this? Where are we now?” (Lines 8-9). Rather, the passengers reflect humanity’s inability to sustain interest in the darker side of their own history. In their train compartment, complacent and happy, the passengers symbolize humanity’s ability to exist both as a part of and apart from their own history. By seeing the fields around Verdun as just that, the passengers guarantee new Verduns, somewhere, sometime.

For Carl Sandburg, himself a veteran, the most problematic part of the war dynamic is how civilians really do not want to know how wars are actually executed. Years after the battle, they will visit battlefields only because now they look more like manicured golf courses scattered with cannons and statues. The carnage, the gore, the stench, the screams, and the stacks of corpses are all buried beneath the grass. In this, the passengers symbolize humanity’s willingness to forget their own history.

The Grass

For more than five decades as a poet and public figure, Carl Sandburg acknowledged his creative debt to Walt Whitman. Sandburg was in his early teens when Whitman died and was quite aware of the nation’s outpouring of love and admiration. Here, Sandburg taps into the symbol of grass, which, for Whitman and his cycle of poems published under the title Leaves of Grass, came to embody the essential faith Whitman had in the spiritual reality of nature and its fierce energy that would not and could not be diminished. Sandburg, a veteran with battlefield experience, and Whitman, a volunteer nurse in field hospitals around Washington, DC, both witnessed firsthand the butchery of war. And both found in the lush green of grass a symbol for nature’s endurance—its resilience despite, not because of, humanity.

Much as in Whitman’s post–Civil War poems, in which he interrogated his own faith in the promise of the American democratic experiment, Sandburg here suspends the poem between his aspirational faith in the green energy of nature and his disgust over humanity’s inhumanity. By using the grass itself as his speaker, Sandburg avoids indulging his own pacifist outrage over the waste of war. The grass is indifferent to what is being fought for, what is at stake, why these battles happen, and the grotesque piles of corpses strewn about the fields. The grass only wants to return to the business of growing, three times repeating, “Let me work.” In this the grass symbolizes nature’s great indifferent machinery, its commitment to fertility and renewal, and its dismissal of humanity’s grandest dramas as insignificant.