SOURCE: Crowder, Richard. “Sandburg's Chromatic Vision in Honey and Salt.” In The Vision of This Land: Studies of Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, and Carl Sandburg, edited by John E. Hallwas and Dennis J. Reader, pp. 92-104. Macomb: Western Illinois University Press, 1976.

[In the following essay, Crowder investigates Sandburg's rich and figurative use of color in his 1963 collection, Honey and Salt.]

Caroline Spurgeon reminds us that the act of seeing involves all that man is. It is the means by which, for example, the poet observes and absorbs a great part of life, engaging both the mentality and the imagination in receiving sight impressions, then describing them and giving them significance. The poet as a whole person is involved.¹

Not least in the seeing process is the reception of colors, to which some observers are patently more sensitive than others. Faber Birren remarks, as case in point, that psychologists frequently find older people more inclined to notice form than color.² Birren is a well-known American consultant in color, author of numerous books on the subject with relation not only to personality but also to such topics as interior decoration, printing, packaging, sales, mental therapy, and painting. His clients have included many large businesses, and some twenty-five years ago he developed standards of color practice adopted by the United States Navy and Coast Guard. Birren's credentials are considerable. What he has to say about the connection between one's color preferences, age, and traits of character can be accepted with confidence, for his statements are drawn not from the surmises of tea-room faddists but from the considered conclusions of psychologists, psychoanalysts, and biologists after myriad experiments and discoveries.

Carl Sandburg was an exception to Birren's generalization about the elderly and their apparent decreased interest in color, for as an old man (his last book was published on his eighty-fifth birthday) he was addicted to color more than were any of his contemporaries in their last work. His Honey and Salt (1963) makes reference to colors close to three hundred times, more often than not in observation of the phenomena of the natural scene. Although he moved from the Midwest to North Carolina twenty-two years before his death, he never forgot the prairies and the cornfields, the skies and the water of his birth region. On the other hand, always sensitive to the scene about him, he recorded the nuances of change in his new surroundings as well, including mountains and sea, from morning to evening, from day to day, from season to season. The hue and shade in which he took such pleasure is the subject of this essay, together with some speculation as to their possible psychological implications drawn from Birren's analysis.

By way of contrast with Sandburg, Wallace Stevens refers to color only some forty-five times in “The Rock,” the last section of his Collected Poems (1954). The fact that Stevens by this time was almost totally ruminative (“The Plain Sense of Things,” “The World as Meditation,” “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself”) may in part explain not only the scarcity of color but also the tranquillity of what colors there are, the dominating greens and blues with dashes of brilliance only for accent.

E. A. Robinson, in Nicodemus (1932), his final book of shorter poems, presents a different problem because of his bias toward character analysis. He uses black more than any other color, and that chiefly in describing the central figure of “Toussaint L'Ouverture.” Total color references are fewer than in Stevens. Fire and blood, brought into the picture of violence in some of the poems, are next in frequency to black, but a paucity of vivid color is a marked trait of Robinson, whose efforts are expended not on exterior description but on attempts at understanding the interior lives of his characters.

Ezra Pound's “Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII” (1969) contains a few whites, blues, and greens, a scattering of yellows, reds, blacks, and one gray. Had not the elderly Pound lost much of his energy? Had he not turned to contemplation at the cost of earlier exuberance and vituperation? Cool colors would tend to support such a conclusion.

In Four Quartets (1943) of T. S. Eliot it is not surprising that “fire” (“flame,” “glow,” “glare”) exceeds the whites and grays by fourfold, for it is toward the “crowned knot of fire” that the soul is voyaging. Except for a few instances of red and sapphire, the other colors, thinly spread, are fairly subdued: brown, yellow, black, and green. The poet was only in his mid-fifties when Four Quartets was published, but after this book he turned his attentions to the drama. One can explain the colors in part by saying that much of the imagery is liturgical (fire) and also by recognizing that the poetry is largely cerebral (white and gray). On the whole, however, references to color are rare.

In Book Five of Paterson (1958, the poet being seventy-five) William Carlos Williams is persistent in his repetition of white, especially in the description of a unicorn and a tapestry. Other than the whites there is relatively little color, compared, for example, with the last poems of Stevens. One might speculate the cause as being Williams's scientific mind (accustomed to antisepsis) or possibly fidelity to the outward colorlessness of industrial New Jersey.

Like Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings distributes the colors with a steady unlavish hand in his last collection, 73 Poems (posthumous, 1963). Whites are more numerous than any other color. One would expect, if memory does not fail, some fair-sized quantities of green and gold, but there are only five of the one and four of the other. After two reds, the list dwindles to one reference each to blue, yellow, purple, and fire. In the last of these poems, Cummings uses the concept of timelessness to show what time is.³ Color finds no easy place in such transcendental abstraction.

Robert Frost's last book of short poems to all intents and purposes ignores color. In the sixty pages of In the Clearing (1962) colors are named only nine times and then not always color for its own sake: “the Red Man,” “da Gama's gold,” “an albino monkey,” “like a ripe tomato,” “a pitch-dark limitless grove,” “the orchard green,” “flowery burst of pink and white,” and “the Milky Way.” For a poet who relates himself closely to the out-of-doors, this dearth is surprising. Page after page is devoid of even a hint of color. If Birren's observation is valid, that, as one ages, his interest is elsewhere than in color, then assuredly Frost as old man would be proof positive.⁴

Not so with Sandburg. In Honey and Salt over two hundred eighty-five color references occur, either by overt naming or by suggestion (in sixty-five pages of the Complete Poems⁵). With the exception of the Robinson and Frost books, the other collections we have named are considerably shorter, but, even so, to judge by the number of color references divided by the number of pages, no other major twentieth-century American poet born before 1900 was so prodigal of color as Sandburg.

Victor Laprade, the nineteenth-century French poet, said that in order to be effective in writing and describing (he makes a play on peindre), it is not enough for a poet to think, but he must also see.⁶ It can be said that Sandburg began by seeing not only shapes, but tints. He had a vivid sense of color which he relied on all his life. His first book, Chicago Poems (1916), although not quite so “colorful” as Honey and Salt, nevertheless made use of hue and shade over two hundred fifty times. In this first book reds are prominent, for there is a great deal of brawling and heartiness as well as a sense of social injustice here (red being a color of violence). White is next, followed in frequency by yellow, brown, and gray in close order. Not so often, but at the same time not so sparse as in Williams or Moore, are green, blue, purple, flame, and black (but none of the pink to be found in the final book).

Forty-seven years later, his life drawing to a close, Sandburg is still painting his images in varied and brilliant, often dazzling colors. Even when he does not mention particular hues, he is aware of the presence of “tint,” “glint,” “rainbow,” “dark flower,” and “sunny hill” as well as “crystal” and “prism,” which reflect color. He records the achromatic object colors black and white in both literal description and imaginative figure (as we shall see)—white most of all, black ten times.

Sandburg's long-time friend Archibald MacLeish said of him in a memorial address: “With Sandburg it is the body of the work that weighs, the sum of it, a whole quite literally greater than the total of its parts.”⁷ The first poem of Chicago Poems records details of a brawny metropolis; the last poem in Honey and Salt, over seven hundred fifty pages later, celebrates the evolutionary rise and triumph of the Family of Man. Between are hundreds of poems, long and short, made of particulars touched, smelled, tasted, heard, and above all seen, that add up to a holistic picture of life itself. This impressionistic collection emphasizes immediate objects and action without analytical attention or intellectual speculation. It reminds one of the painters of the last third of the nineteenth century (Monet, for example) whose short brush strokes of bright colors in close proximity put the burden of mixing on the mind and psychological reaction of the beholder. Honey and Salt's seventy-six poems focus on love and alienation (and evanescence), compassion and indifference, identity and the impersonality of number, but Sandburg's steady theme is empirical: the vanity of trying to attain abstract definitions of the big concepts. Day-by-day living and observing yield what answers are available. No one poem settles the matter; all the poems add up to the all-important sum total. His many metaphors for love, for example, are to be found in the unexpected little quotidian experiences. These seemingly inconsequential sights and sounds, to return to the Impressionists, become in juxtaposition the differentiated whole.⁸

In examining the color references, we will move from the smallest number to the greatest. Pink, purple, and black occur least of all in Sandburg's last book. Pink is the color of flamingo feathers (pp. 736, 763), but the poet carries the color into symbolism in his search for the qualities of love, an ultimately indescribable delicacy. A first sign of love is “pink doors closing one by one” (p. 707), the seductive charm of narrowing choices. Just as Emily Dickinson (whom Sandburg admired) selected her “own society,” so, says Sandburg, does the young lover see that he must close “pink doors … one by one.” In another metaphoric use of color, Sandburg suggests the nubile properties of a burgeoning season in “The pink nipples of the earth in springtime” (p. 759), an image which has its source not only in the sight of fruit-tree blooms but in a sense of fertile youth and promise. The shade of rose in “First Sonata for Karlen Paula” serves as harmonizing factor: “rose-candle co-ordinations” (p. 749) and “rose-light” as a pool in which floats a “ring of topaz,” but this is virtually a literal description of the sky at daybreak. Elsewhere, the poet speculates that lovers may have talked of “wild arbutus they found” (p. 751). So, except for the pink doors and the pink nipples, Sandburg uses the color only to picture straightforwardly what he has seen. In context a mood of charm, softness, and warmth emerges. Birren says indeed that pink is the color of love and affection. A person who prefers it is said to be likable and to have a fond attachment for the full life, even although he may not have a strong capacity for participating in it. But note this: Sandburg chooses to color his images pink very rarely.⁹

Purple (including violet, amethyst, and lavender) is of no more interest to the poet than pink. He uses it to little symbolic purpose. It helps him to describe the sea (pp. 714, 722, 759), the distant scene—mountains and horizon (pp. 707, 743), the coming of evening (p. 730), and the wings of a luna moth (p. 764). Only in one place does he put the evolutionary past far back “among lavender shadows” (p. 761), where the facts are hard to distinguish, where the purple shades are opaque screens between the here and the there, the now and the then.

As for black, it describes the feathers of a crow (p. 763) and the rings of a caterpillar (p. 764), but it does more. It is the background for various forms of light: actual lights of an evening (p. 708) and fireworks contrasting with black water (p. 749); five brass ships in “pools of ink” (p. 724); lightning in “a black rain” (p. 720); and dawn coming “out of the night of black ice” (p. 710). This latter is somewhat symbolic, for day is pictured as warm and friendly in contrast with the darkness and potential hostility of night. The same kind of threat emerges in the image of love as a rose which will “curl black” (p. 737) as the relationship withers and in the emptiness of “the Black Void” (p. 767). On the other hand, no threat at all, but a voluptuous appeal is intended in “the black velvet sheen of midnight” (p. 736) and the beautiful and fresh image of “The long black eyelashes of summer's look” (p. 759). Contrast, background, threat, and luxuriousness—although black is in limited supply in this book, it is put to varied use.

Green, flame, and brown are the colors next in frequency (about fifteen times each). Green is often the color of water, especially the sea (pp. 756, 759, 760, 761), and of water creatures: lobsters are gray-green (p. 760) and sea-green (p. 763); a frog is as “green as the scum he sits on” (p. 764). Green is the color of mist (pp. 767, 769), moss (p. 749), and a parakeet (p. 768). Only twice does Sandburg go beyond literal description: when he brushes in the scene of spring with a synecdochic “creep of green on branches” (p. 733) and suggests heat, sensuousness, and a slow pace in “pearl-green miles of summer months” (p. 764).

Sandburg's use of fire and flame is in general conventional. He mentions Elijah's “chariot of fire” (p. 714); he pictures burning cornstalks lighting up the November sky with their fire (p. 727); a fire dancer waves “two flambeaus” (p. 730); the “fire leaves” of a bonfire sing “a slow song” (p. 749). Flaming blossoms (pp. 731, 738), leaves (p. 770), and sun (pp. 710, 758) do not surprise the reader. It is natural for Sandburg to put flame and fire in opposition to coolness: colored leaves reflected in river water may suggest to the viewer a Nazi burning of a ghetto—“a slow fire of Warsaw” (p. 746); the earth is a “heaving fireball cooled off” (p. 770); a dead man is “proof against / ice or fire” (p. 726); in the long evolutionary poem “Timesweep,” the poet uses a metaphor of “flame” to suggest the energy of the year's seasons at their peaks and the “cool” as their beginnings and endings:

Each speaks its own oaths of the cool and the flame
          of naked possessions clothed and come naked again.

(p. 759)

Similarly, shades of brown (bronze, rust, sorrel, russet, umber, tan, tawny) are often very quick strokes of the impressionist's brush. They describe an evening sky (p. 724) and the foliage of autumn (pp. 745, 746, 759), which is also characterized by wheatstraw and cornshock (pp. 733, 745). Mention of “the red fox” (p. 765) implies orange-red to reddish brown. A pony on the prairie has a “sorrel face” (p. 768); pigeons are “mate brown” (p. 768).

But brown adds to the poet's figurative language more than the colors we have considered so far. For lovers, as evening comes, the moon is “a bronze wafer” (p. 735). Ships at anchor “fade into walls of umber” (p. 724). The honey of the book's title poem is the golden side of love—the sweetness, the glisten (p. 706). Love can appear unexpectedly, for sometimes “it's a summer tan” (p. 706), but, unfortunately, love as symbolized by the rose can “wither brown” (p. 737). Statues of strong leaders invite the epithet “bronze gods” (p. 721), although the seeming endurance of bronze must not be misleading (“Ubi sunt … ?”). In giving advice to his granddaughter, the poet proposes occasional contemplation, the child seated “silent in a chair of tarnished bronze” (a brown study?), her mood a combination of quiet, antique music and autumn melancholy: “Now I will be / a clavichord melody / in October brown” (p. 750).

Brown and its shades, according to Birren's researches,¹⁰ indicate substantiality, dependability, steadiness, agelessness. For Sandburg they would appear variously to hold these qualities, yes, but also a tinge of sadness, evanescence (when the rose turns brown, when day disappears into night), and introspection (“October brown”).

Sandburg at eighty-five was more interested in gray than in the colors we have thus far touched upon (although other colors, as will be apparent, were still more useful to him). Gray (which in these poems includes “mousey,” “gunmetal,” and “smoke”) is often the first choice of older, mature people; a quiet mixture of the entire spectrum, it typifies life on an even keel—nothing too much.¹¹ Although white, blue, and green are colors that the poet uses to color the sea, sometimes water is also gray, especially if the mood is meditative (pp. 711, 747, 748). The season of the year has an influence:

To the north is the gray sky.
Winter hung it gray for the gray
          elm to stand dark against.

(p. 722)

Fog is generally gray (pp. 729, 755), as when mountains in a Japanese print go “into gray shawls on Friday” (p. 743); and mountains themselves can be gray as they slope down “to the rivers” (p. 747). A tree frog is hard to distinguish against “the tree-bark-gray” (p. 764). More particularly, the bark of the hickory and the beech is gray (pp. 746, 770), the latter actually “silver-gray.” Weevils leave “ashen paths” (p. 764).

Sandburg encapsulates maternal love and influence in the phrase “a mother's grey eyes singing to her children” (p. 753). The quietness of a deep love is characterized by “a little gray sparrow” (p. 735) and the unpresumptive “my little pretty mousey love” (p. 735). Smoke as gray connotes such a mood as melancholy or loneliness in “those in smoke garments” (p. 731) or vagueness tinged with pensiveness in “the smoke-shadow of a dream” (p. 768).

The poet puts gun-metal to two uses. He sees it first as the skeletal structure of a skyscraper: “The inside torso stands up in a plug of gun-metal” (p. 724). Then, the coming of evening is “a dusk of gun-metal” (p. 724). The most symbolic of the occurrences of the gray is in “Timesweep,” when the persona refers to himself (a Whitmanesque representative of the human race) as “one more swimmer in the gold and gray procession” (p. 771); that is, in life that is sometimes triumphant and ecstatic, noble and elevated, sometimes introspective and tranquil, sad and monotonous.

From twenty-four references to grays, the leap to forty yellow-related hues is the beginning of an affirmative revelation about Sandburg. If we judge by his preferences in colors out of all the phenomena he could record in his world, Sandburg was no run-of-the-mill old man, content with a conventional modicum of grays, blacks, browns, and purples. A man who chooses yellows (including gold, brass, orange, saffron, and lemon), according to Birren, is good-natured and loves the companionship of other people. A man of good will, he is solicitous of others and even defers to their opinions and convictions. Characteristically euphoric, he rarely has mental problems, appears to be insulated against great heights and depths of emotion and intellect. A preference for various yellows shows imagination, interest in novelty, a nervous drive toward self-fulfillment. Yet the man may live in a world apart, introspective and contemplative.¹²

Although in Sandburg's poems such comments as “brass is a hard lean metal” and “gold is the most ductile metal” (p. 710) focus on qualities of malleability, the sensitive reader is aware also of their yellowish color, much of which elsewhere occurs in straightforward description, recording, for example, the appearance of a lead pencil (p. 745), caterpillar rings and the wings of a lunar moth (p. 764), a fanciful “yellow horse” (p. 750), love as “a goldfinch” (p. 735), fireflies as “night gold” (p. 765). Autumn leaves, of course, he sees as yellow (pp. 743, 744, 746); wheatstraws are partly gold (p. 733), and corn is yellow (pp. 719, 727). The Missouri pours its yellow waters into the Mississippi (p. 719). Dust makes a yellow sheet over a cornfield (p. 753). In another season “the branches all end with the yellow and gold mice of early spring air” (p. 722).

Gold and topaz brighten the sky as dawn comes on (p. 750). Reflection of light tints the water of a fish bowl until it becomes “molten-gold air” (p. 755). At the end of the day the setting sun accents the landscapes “with shot gold of an evening” (p. 753). The wings of birds flash “in sunset gold” (p. 732). Five ships are “sheathed in brass haze” (p. 724). Along the sky “long tubes spread lemon” (p. 746), the color caught “in the lemon sea” (p. 747). The moon itself is sometimes gold (pp. 735, 752, 764) and sometimes brass (p. 735).

Oranges and bananas, just by being named, suggest their color (pp. 749, 768). The loot from a sunken ship is brass (p. 718). In apparel the poet notes “cream gold buttons” (p. 742), “yellow silk bandannas” (p. 750), “a pair of orange slippers” (p. 750), and ochre as part of a jockey's silks (p. 728).

More metaphorical is the description of life as a “gold and gray procession” (p. 771), gold bringing up images of brightness, triumph, and riches. In analyzing the first signs of love, the poet says it may be “a brass cry” or “a golden gong going ong ong ong-ng-ng” (p. 707), primarily onomatopoeic, but recalling color. Again, although he emphasizes metal as value, Sandburg suggests color in defining various levels of sin: brass and “old gold” (p. 748), an interesting reversal, for in the mercantile world gold would have greater monetary value than brass but here represents highly reprehensible offenses.

From time to time the poet writes of the responsibility of a user of words. In “Almanac” (p. 712) he bids the reader to

Take an alphabet of gold or mud and spell
as you wish any words: kiss me, kill me,
love, hate, ice, thought, victory.

If the speller's letters are of mud, the words may be vicious; if on the other hand, they are of gold, the result may be loving, contemplative, triumphant.

It is clear from this listing that Sandburg thinks highly of the euphoric and energetic color yellow and its related hues. As an old man he sees yellow more frequently in Honey and Salt than he did in the 1916 Chicago Poems. But even more is he drawn to images in red and blue and white. Red and blue, about equal in their appeal to the poet (references to each are in the mid-forties), generally are considered contradictory in their psychological implications.

Red is the color of interests directed outward.¹³ Through red the highly wrought emotions find release. (There are nearly twice as many reds in Chicago Poems as in the less explosive Honey and Salt.) A “red” man is more often than not vigorous, assertive, even impulsive, but with a base of deep sympathy. If his opinions are formed quickly, he is still not stubborn, but open to persuasion.

In the use of red Sandburg is now and then deliberately obscure in his attempt to express the ultimately inexpressible. He wrote to G. D. Eaton on July 14, 1922: “For me, it is a test of a work of art whether it has the elusive, the incommunicable.”¹⁴ When his granddaughter asks, “Which of you on a golden morning / has sent a silver bullet / into a crimson target?” (p. 750), the reader's reaction must be mystification, for, although there is a hint of the rising sun, in context with “a silver bullet” there is no certain equation. “Copper” (p. 748), placed between “brass” on the one hand and “old gold” on the other, may indicate sins of middle seriousness, but the poet does not provide clarification. Some passionate mortal “may cry … / for red answers to a white riddle” (p. 717), but why “red”? For unthinking, possibly violent emotional reaction?

In a poem about Indians Sandburg employs the word copper three times, not only in indicating the skin hue of the people—“copper girl” and “copper men”—but in describing the evening sky: “the copper curve of prairie sunset” (p. 719). Blood, of course, brings red to mind (pp. 742, 763). Jockey's silks have red stripes (p. 728). “Red silk bandannas” (p. 734) and “red silk scarfs in a high wind” (p. 717) are symbols of love and passion.

Typically the poet's reds, like most of his colors, are literal in their function. A fire dancer flourishes her torches and casts “red shadows” (p. 730). In one of his many metaphors defining love and the signs of love, Sandburg says that sometimes love comes as “a slow blinking of two red lanterns in river mist” (p. 708). The sun is red in the morning (p. 723) and casts a “bronze and copper path” for the approach of dusk, itself a “maroon” (p. 724). The poet warns that, for appreciation's sake, “The praise of any slow red moonrise should be slow” (p. 710). To some viewers the moon appears “a copper coin” (p. 735), and at times there are “ribbons of red” across the sky (p. 753).

Among the birds Sandburg chooses the redbird (tanager?) and the cardinal (p. 763) and a maroon cockatoo (p. 768). His hippopotamus is “red-mouthed” (p. 728), his lobsters are “red and sea-green” (p. 763). In one of his obscure phrases he says of fish in a bowl that “their speech was scarlet” (p. 755), possibly explained by the reflection of light as they moved, breathed, and had their being. In seeking relevant metaphors for love, he speculates that perhaps love is “a big red apple” (pp. 736, 737), the color here not necessarily chosen for passion but for succulence and desirability.

Red plants and flowers especially attract the poet's attention. Redhaws are said to be of a “gypsy crimson” (p. 745), and sumach is red and crimson (p. 746). In the autumn “a red silk creeps among the broad ears” of corn, where also “A red flower ripens” (p. 727). In most passages the poet is more specific as to the kind of flower. Not unexpectedly, “Passion may come with baskets / throwing paths of red rain flowers” (p. 717). (Is this a Sandburg invention? The dictionaries do not list “rain flowers.”) He notes that “dahlia leaves are points of red” (p. 733), that poppies have “crimson sheaths” (p. 717), that carnations are crimson (p. 751). The rose is always red (crimson) in Sandburg—no yellow, no pink, no white, always red when the color is delineated. At dawn one sees “crimson ramblers / up the ladders of daytime arriving” (p. 710). (Incidentally, this present participle echoes Sandburg's beloved Whitman.) But the rose he sees as inadequate symbol for love, although he struggles with it at length in “Little Word, Little White Bird” (pp. 735-40). Sandburg's argument is that the rose is easily destroyed and very easily replaced (pp. 737-38). The rejection of the rose comes in spite of eleven occurrences in fifteen lines. The rose appears twenty-six times in Honey and Salt, and there is no reason to think of it as of any other color than red. (As in Chicago Poems, there are here many flowers, most of them mentioned only once.)

Interest in blue is about equal to interest in red in this final book. The combination, if we follow Birren, increases the complexity of Sandburg's portrait. Whereas red suggests an outgoing personality, blue is the color of deliberation and introspection.¹⁵ A man who prefers blue is sensitive not only to others but to himself. He knows himself well enough that he can keep a firm grip on his enthusiasms and passions. A “red” man can be talked into seeing justification in the other side of a question, but a “blue” man, filled with considerable egotism, will hold to his opinions as the last word, fixed, inflexible. If fame comes to a man who prefers red, it generally is the result of his restlessness, whereas a man who chooses blue will achieve fame only through patience and perseverance.

How then does Sandburg make use of blue? Generally in a quite conservative and conventional way. He sees water bugs as blue (p. 764) and notes that baboons have blue rumps (p. 766). Fog, mist, smoke, and flame are tinged with blue (pp. 708, 710, 749, 754, 758, 767). He speculates that “a quiet blue flower” or even specifically bluebells might have been in the lover's mind when he told his sweetheart, “Thou art like a flower” (p. 751). He celebrates the morning glory as it “staggers on / a path of sea-blue, sky-blue / Gettysburg Union blue” (p. 741). (Sandburg the Lincoln enthusiast is speaking here.) He describes the delphinium in his brother-in-law Edward Steichen's Connecticut garden as “a rocketform of blue” (p. 753) bearing “little mistblue cups” (p. 754).

Distances make objects blue: there are “blue peaks” (p. 743); a haystack is a “blue smudge” (p. 753). And of course the sky is blue (pp. 716, 729, 743, 744, 745, 753, 755, 759, 760, 763). In describing Lake Michigan the poet sees blue in constant interplay with white in true impressionistic style: “water blown from snowwhite mountains / met the blue rise of lowland waters” (p. 732). And among other colors the sea is blue (pp. 722, 747, 748). In writing of “New Weather,” Sandburg recalls that “Fair weather rode in with a blue oath” (a promise of continuance?). But what happened? “Blue rains soaked the lowland loam” (p. 733).

Finally, in “Impasse” the poet seems to equate the mystery of tricks of magic with “offertories in blue,” begging the performer to “Tell us again: Nothing is impossible. / We listen while you tell us” (p. 728). Men long for certainties, for reassurances, but the truth is that, when the show is over, confidence fades into the blue.

White, supposed to denote naiveté and innocence (in Sandburg surely only a pose), recalls purity and youth (which the impatience of some readers of this poet would label childishness). White is commonly associated with simplicity, candid honesty, and decency.¹⁶ Far from being an absence of color, however, white for Sandburg is a lively hue in its own right. Goethe is said to have considered white the brightest of all colors, and the same can be said of Sandburg, whose images do not tend toward the fearful white spider, moth, and heal-all of Frost's “Design,” nor indeed the threatening whiteness of Moby Dick. Rather, characteristically, the whiteness of the salt in the title poem calls forth the Biblical “savor” of a life lived in love (p. 706).

More references to white than to any other color accent Honey and Salt (over fifty-five, including milk, snow, ice, lamb wool, silver, tin, and aluminum). Chicago Poems, forty-seven years before, contained about the same number, topped, however, by nearly seventy-five references to red, possibly because of Sandburg's bursts of violence in propagandizing for the labor force. In late June, 1917, in fact, he confessed to Amy Lowell that here and there he was able to detect such a strain in his verse at the expense of a more human quality.¹⁷ On the other hand, there is very little of the early stridency in Honey and Salt: years and conscientious effort had softened the noise.

Even Sandburg's use of ice and snow is not negative. Although the earth eventually should become an “iceball,” it will be “heaving” (p. 770); “hills of ice” are actively inhabited by “polar bears” (p. 765). Leif Ericson sights “a soft white horse on the top cone of an iceberg” (p. 714); elsewhere an iceberg wears a “shining white hat” (p. 768). Snow is a covering, it blows, it is a bed (pp. 759, 731, 767), although in “Old Hokusai Print” Sandburg considers “the white snow on the blue peaks” as “no dream snow” (p. 743).

As for the “white” metals, Sandburg's passage on the various prices of sins in hell (graded according to veniality and gravity?) lists “tin and aluminum sins” and also “silver-dollar sins” (p. 748). Silver is indeed a frequent choice of the poet's. Even in its metallic uses it suggests whiteness: referring to payment, Phocion's executioner demands “more silver for more hemlock” (p. 713); granddaughter Karlen Paula's obscure “silver bullet” (p. 750) is undeniably white against the crimson sunrise. The sound of silver causes a pleasant reaction in addition to its reflection of light: one of the first signs of love may be “a silver ring” (p. 707) as of a bell; the whippoorwill has a “silver throat” (p. 764). The shine of the sun is silver (pp. 749, 762) as it lights the legs of a spider (p. 754). And at night the moon can be silver (pp. 716, 735).

Developing his theme of the family of man and the democracy of death, Sandburg reminds us that “all bones [are] white” (p. 742). Elsewhere, he points out that the elephant has “straight ivory tusks” (p. 736). Innocent whiteness is apparent in the act of “a child drinking a bowl of milk” (p. 745). The poet recollects how his granddaughter was entranced by foxgloves one summer day—by “The snowsilk buds” and the “deep wells of white,” a part of the bloom (p. 727). He pictures “lotus and pond lilies” as white (p. 764).

In the evening, as the moon comes up, it turns “the corners” of a skyscraper into “white prisms and spikes” (p. 723). In fact at one stage the moon itself is white (pp. 722, 755) as is the starlight (p. 749). Of a morning comes “A white shot dawn” (p. 755). In rising smoke the poet sometimes sees “Sheet white egg faces” (p. 756), not always gray. The whiteness of wool helps Sandburg describe a cloud, which takes various shapes, including “six white snakes” (p. 724), not threatening, simply passing. In order to describe the delicacy of love, he says it is “thinner than snowwhite wool finespun” (p. 758).

A sorrel horse has “a white forelock” (p. 768). More figuratively, “Love is a white horse you ride” (p. 751) (an unconscious borrowing from the scenes of knightly romance?). Again the “moving cloud” takes “A white horse shape” (p. 724). Transferring the figure to the waves of the ocean, the poet likens the breakers to white horses (pp. 708, 710, 767). He says further that “white sea spray” can create loneliness (p. 740), but high-rising waves can be exciting “snowwhite mountains” (p. 732). “Lake Michigan Morning” (p. 732) is structured, as we have seen, on an impressionist's constant interaction of blue and white: “Blue bowls of white water / Poured themselves into white bowls of blue water.” The wind is sometimes “white” (pp. 733, 750), probably in its relation to the clouds. Some birds are white—a gull (p. 760) and an albatross (p. 768). In his search for the aptest symbol for love, Sandburg settles (with much repetition and much testing of other images) on an anonymous “little white bird” (pp. 739, 740).

love is a little white bird
and the flight of it so fast
you can't see it
and you know it's there
only by the faint whirr of its wings
and the hush song coming so low to your ears
you fear it might be silence
and you listen keen and you listen long
and you know it's more than silence

Here is the living white of simple directness, without duplicity, without calculation, but requiring sensitive attention.

Symbolic use of white occurs in other lines. What is “a white riddle” (p. 717) if not an unsolvable mystery? What is “a little mouth's white yearning” (p. 724) if not the inexpressible longings of innocence?

Could one white gull utter a word—
what would it be?
what white feather of a word?

(p. 760)

White here, as in “a white riddle,” is the ineluctable mystery, “the elusive, the incommunicable.” For the most part, however, Sandburg's white is representative of his participation in life, not a withdrawal. In conjunction with his active choice of other colors it shows him to have been a complex man.

In view of his clear loyalty to the United States, and particularly his continuing interest in Lincoln, the American common man, and the historic growth of the country (Remembrance Rock provides a sweeping panorama), it is a startling coincidence that the poet's vision of this land as recorded in Honey and Salt is dominated by red, white, and blue.

For a final impressionistic admixture of hues, one can look at “Runaway Colors” (p. 753), where in six lines the poet creates from the countryside a riotous mélange which the reader (viewer) must merge into a harmonious whole. Nine words and phrases either are specific in naming color or at least succeed in bringing color to mind: “smoke of these landscapes,” “sun,” “shot gold,” “grey,” “blue smudge,” “yellow dust,” “ribbons of red,” “crows,” and even “pits,” which calls up the blackness of a storage hole (not the dead blackness of a grave).

Perhaps if Sandburg had turned his attention away from tints and shades toward (for old men) the normative abstractions of form, line, and structure, he would have been able to achieve greater profundity and to arouse more widespread critical interest, but he probably would have lost his readership. The direct, simple, mainly primary coloring of his images may have been related to his lack of interest in the intricacies of philosophic speculation that attracted, for example. Frost, Stevens, and Eliot in their last works. He appeared rather to find satisfaction in accurately recording the outward appearance of what he saw in his kaleidoscopic universe.

In part, then, his continued youthful eye for color can be attributed to his determined purpose to direct his poems toward the “simple people,” as he himself called the common folk of America, readers with unsophisticated literary taste (of course, they were not his exclusive patrons). Such an attitude kept his thoughts on the thoughts of the man in the street and field, his eye on the cityscape, seascape, mountainscape, landscape as that man would want to see them and write of them if he had the talent. As Sandburg grew old, his experience of the world naturally affected his intellectual views. But his hope for mankind was irrepressible in the face of social breakdown or even holocaust, and he tempered what he was seeing with the constant idealism we generally attribute to youth not yet made cautious by a tragic view. Sandburg, the old man, transcended tragedy. He lifted up his eyes and was refreshed by nature both around him and in his memories of Illinois. Hence, his poems were colorful to the very end. His capacity for enjoying and sharing with his readers the scenes he loved was part of the reason his lines retained the colors that are said to appeal to the young. His never-discarded esteem for the man of the masses restrained him from extended philosophical profundity even in his last book. This caused him to create descriptions of a bright environment that such a man would read with appreciation. Those pictures would at the same time be recognizable to the ordinary reader and also open up his experience of the universe through the insights of a poet who loved him and spoke his language.

If Sandburg chose to see the world in bright, sanguine colors, we cannot register surprise. His letters, his interviews, his biographies reveal that he was a warm, outgoing, thoughtful American, filled with humor and undeniable joie de vivre, in love with his homeland and dedicated to its people. Although his colors hardly ever serve to complicate matters and color as symbol is rare, Sandburg in his old age, instead of looking for subdued hues in reserved quantities, was using vivid colors in greater abundance than any of his contemporaries. It is testimony to an interest in the phenomena of life ordinarily associated with the vigor of youth.

Notes

1. Caroline Spurgeon. Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1952), p. 57.

2. Color: A Survey in Words and Pictures (New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1963), p. 187. Noted hereafter as Color.

3. E. E. Cummings, Complete Poems (New York: Harcourt, 1972), p. 845. Cf. Jane Donahue, “Cummings' Last Poem: An Explication,” Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht (Kiel), 3 (1970), 106-08.

4. Although Hart Crane was much younger, he died thirty-five years before Sandburg and is often classed as his “contemporary.” In the poems composed after The Bridge (that is, within the last two or three years of his life), Crane used color more than any of the other poets save Sandburg. Shades of white predominate, not always a vivid white, but sometimes “ashen” and “brine-caked.” Over fifty instances of color (in wide variety) occur in the thirty-nine pages of his late poems, including “Key West: An Island Sheaf” and “More Late Poems.” Of course, one must bear in mind that he was still a young man (thirty-three) when he died, before he had lost his young man's predilection for color.

5. Carl Sandburg, Complete Poems (New York: Harcourt, 1970), pp. 706-71.

6. “Pour écrire en poéte, pour peindre, il ne suffit pas d'avoir pensé, il faut avoir vu.” Le Sentiment de la nature. Quoted by Spurgeon, p. 57.

7. Sandburg, Complete Poems, p. xx.

8. In keeping with this concept of one large impressionistic poem, the references in parentheses are to pages (except where noted) rather than to titles in the Complete Poems.

9. Color, p. 195.

10. Ibid., p. 200.

11. Ibid., p. 201.

12. Ibid., p. 196.

13. Ibid., pp. 193-94.

14. The Letters of Carl Sandburg, ed. Herbert Mitgang (New York: Harcourt, 1968), pp. 210-11.

15. Color, p. 198.

16. Ibid., p. 201.

17. Letters, pp. 119-20.