SOURCE: “Sandburg's ‘They Will Say.’” The Explicator 59, no. 3 (2001): 134.

Pity poor Carl Sandburg. Not only is he, at least in Chicago Poems, shamefully driven by ideology (Waggoner 452, 455), but he is guilty of “overly insistent tempos and rigid parallelisms,” “compulsive metrics and rhythms” (Pearce 270, 271), and simultaneously of lacking “meter and verse form, even regular rhythm” (Spiller 180). He “sling[s] a loose, prosy line” (Spayde 108), utters a “blowsy hurrah” (Perkins 42), and is “expostulatory” and “blustering” (Moore 92). Yet at the same time his work is mere “cataloguing” (Walker 126), “mainly a massing of direct details in the fashion of Dreiser” (Spiller 180), and is made up of “flat statements” (Moore 92). And lest we think that even as a “speech-maker” (Pearce 270) Sandburg would have to display some rhetorical skills, show some mastery of figures and schemes, we are told that his work is “emptily rhetorical” (270), that his early verse is “political preachment” and (at least in “I am the People, the Mob”) is no better than “socialist political oratory” (Waggoner 453, 454). From such criticism one gathers that Sandburg's poetry is crude and roughhewn, without subtlety and thoughtfulness. But Sandburg's seven-line poem “They Will Say” is carefully crafted with considerable attention to fine detail and positive rhetorical effect, suggesting that there may be more to Sandburg's poetics than the contradictorily dismissive comments suggest.

The first feature a reader should note about “They Will Say” is the clear but subtle syntactic skeleton that provides a framework for the poem as a whole. This framework spans all but the introductory first line and consists of two parallel clauses distinguished by the semi-colon in the middle of line 4 but linked into a single long sentence. The first clause enumerates the good things that children are taken from; the second, the horrific circumstances they are put into. Both clauses begin anaphorically with identical pronoun subjects (“you” in 2 and 4, addressing the citizens of “my city” in line 1), a past tense verb (“took” 2; “put” 4), and a direct object (“little children” 2, the antecedent of “them” in 4).

This straightforward subject-verb-object word order, the most common in English declarative clauses, is followed in both clauses by long, complex adverbial phrases. In clause 1, “away from” is followed by three structurally distinct noun phrases that are linked by “and” (3, 4): “the sun and the dew” (2, coordinated three-letter nouns); “the glimmers that played in the grass under the great sky” (3, a noun followed by a lengthy modifier); and “the reckless rain” (4, noun preceded by a single adjective). In clause 2, “between walls” is followed by a one-line, then a two-line infinitive phrase: “To work […]” (5), and “To eat […] and [to] die […]” (6-7). The first of these phrases is interrupted by the coordinated adjectives “broken and smothered” (5). The second infinitive phrase itself coordinates “eat” and “die.” Sandburg, in short, embeds subtle and complex variation in two clauses whose parallel structure and subject-verb-object word order make them readily accessible.

Another feature of the poem that merits attention is Sandburg's careful use of alliteration, which is prominent in every line of the poem but the last, where it is not found at all. The alliteration is not merely for the sake of decorative euphony, but serves to link half lines and full lines and, more important, to draw attention to relationships between words linked by alliteration, and words that stand out because they are pointedly excluded from it. In line 1, “city” and “say” are alliterative, the action concerns the city that the poem is describing. Within this alliteration are “worst” and “will,” the quality of what is said thus linked alliteratively with the verb. The alliteration of “say” in line 1 with “sun” in line 2 furthermore links the introductory sentence with the long sentence, the core of the poem.

The alliteration of gl-gr in line 3 links the somewhat unusual noun—“glimmers” rather than, say, “glimmerings”—with key words in the modifier that follow it: “the grass” in which the play of the “glimmers” was visible under the “great” sky. In line 4 the noun “rain” and its adjective “reckless” are alliterative in the third modifying noun phrase in clause 1.

The place in which the children are put, between “walls” (4), is linked by alliteration to what they are made to do there, “work” for “wages” in line 5. Just as in line 1, line 5 features a concentric alliterative pattern where, within the alliteration of “work” and “wages,” lie “broken” and “bread.” To earn a rudimentary sustenance, “bread,” the children are “broken,” so that what they have earned ironically does them no good. And the bread itself becomes sterile and choking “dust” that reduces them to dust; makes them “die” rather than live, as line 6 emphasizes through alliteration. The coordination of “eat” and “die” in line 6 collocates with bitter irony two words from normally contrary semantic fields: The children's eating leads not to life but to death; what they eat, “dust,” is death. In line 5, the one word that is not alliterative, “smothered,” draws attention for that very reason to the intentional way in which the children are killed. The nuanced power of the way key words are linked in this poem reaches its climax in the penultimate lines, and all the more so because intra-line alliteration is suddenly absent from the poem's concluding line.

Part of the unity and compressed power of the poem comes from linking two clauses into a single sentence. But the assonance of /e:/ in six of the poem's seven lines—“say” (1), “away” (2), “played,” “great” (3), “rain” (4), “wages” (5), “pay,” “Saturday” (7)—reinforces this. In addition, this assonance sometimes links conceptually related words: Children are taken away from the natural beauty of the “glimmers” of light that played (as the children no doubt did themselves) under the open, spacious, “great” sky (2-3); their meager pay—what their wages (5) amount to—is given out on Saturday nights (7), at the end of a long, harsh work week.

Repetition of vowel sounds (assonance), of initial sounds (alliteration), and of words is used in a remarkable way to link line 2 with line 7. We have already noted the assonance of “away” (2) with “pay” and “Saturday.” In addition, the /ju:/ of “dew” (2) occurs elsewhere only in line 7 in “few.” The initial consonant of “sun” (2) is repeated in that of “Saturday” (7). But the linkage of the second and last lines is even more subtly shaped than I have so far suggested. The brightness suggested by the references to the sun and dew from which the children were taken is contrasted to both the physical and moral darkness connoted by the reference to “a few Saturday nights.” Linking the first and last lines in the core of the poem in so intricate a fashion contributes to the poem's unity and compressed power.

One final aspect of the poem's artistry is that the penultimate line ends with a surprising description of the children eventually dying “empty-hearted?” This surprises the reader because the expected phrase here would be “empty-handed.” But “empty-hearted” quickly strikes us as even more powerfully apt, because it points to an emotional and spiritual emptiness greater and more destructive than lack of money, though poverty and overwork are its cause. In the last line, however, the expectation denied at the end of line 6 is obliquely satisfied in the reference to a “handful of pay.” This denial, then satisfaction, of expectations gives the poem an additional intensity in its final lines.

“They Will Say” is clearly much more than “subliterary” (Waggoner 452); better than “quasi-poetry” (Pearce 271), whatever that may be. It shows the use of a “marvellous prosody” (Rexroth 48) to create “taut verse” indeed (Cunliffe 259), and it reveals that in reading Sandburg we are certainly, contra Waggoner (453), very much in “the presence of a ‘shaping spirit’” working skillfully not only to “vivify [...] abstractions” but to deploy the resources of language and rhetoric to give a quite concrete sense of the sufferings wrought by industrial capitalism at the beginning of the twentieh century in Sandburg's America.

Works Cited

Cunliffe, Marcus. The Literature of the United States. 3rd ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.

Moore, Geoffrey. “American Poetry and the English Language, 1900-45.” American Literature Since 1900. 2nd ed. Ed. Marcus Cunliffe. London: Sphere Books, 1987.

Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Continuity of American Poetry. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961.

Perkins, David. A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and After. Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1987.

Rexroth, Kenneth. American Poetry in the Twentieth Century. New York: Seabury Press, 1973.

Sandburg, Carl. Chicago Poems. 1916. New York: Dover, 1994.

Spayde, Jon. “Modernist Poetry in Chicago.” The American Century: Art & Culture 1900-1950. Ed. Barbara Haskell. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art/Norton, 1999.

Spiller, Robert. The Cycle of American Literature. New York: New American Library, 1956.

Waggoner, Hyatt. American Poets: From the Puritans to the Present. New York: Dell, 1968.

Walker, Marshall. History of American Literature. Chicago: St. James Press, 1983.