by Aaron Dollhausen

Created on: September 23, 2010   Last Updated: September 27, 2010

An Indifference to War: Explication of Carl Sandburg’s “Grass”

Carl Sandburg was a veteran of the Spanish-American War who became disillusioned with the seemingly meaningless ability of nations to wage war. Not only did nations escape the lessons history teaches about war, he thought, but each war’s fallen soldiers were forgotten as well. In every war fought, Sandburg believed men were marginalized and used as tools. An active Socialist and pacifist, he made his displeasure known of how badly soldiers were treated as individuals and as a group. In the periodical International Socialist Review, Sandburg contended that soldiers were nothing more than laborers to be used in the service of society’s elite (Allen 15, 16). When their services were no longer needed, the laborers were quickly forgotten, even if the soldier-as-laborers were dead. In his poem “Grass,” Carl Sandburg accuses society of indifference towards war’s tragic legacy as well as soldiers killed during war.

Throughout “Grass,” Sandburg uses free verse to mimic ordinary conversation and avoids many dramatic elements, such as rhyme, meter, or vivid language to invoke intense emotion which can sometimes be used in anti-war poetry. Carl Sandburg structures the poem “Grass” into three stanzas. The first stanza begins with an order to pile the bodies of dead soldiers. Then the locations of the piles of dead soldiers are revealed: two Napoleonic battles. Another order followed this, to shovel the bodies under to make the piles higher. The narrator then demands to be left alone to work. The last line reveals that the narrator is grass. The stanza ends with a simple declarative: grass covers everything. The first stanza serves as an introduction which sets the tone of the poem and where most of the action of the poem takes place.

The second stanza follows a similar pattern as the first but includes the locations of battles from two different wars: the American Civil War and World War I. Grass repeats the order to pile the bodies high, suggesting that grass is becoming impatient, even irritated that the battles are interrupting its work of covering. This reinforces the grass’ indifference to the bodies and to the battles. The midpoint of the second stanza shows how the element of time is unimportant to the grass. A second narrator is briefly introduced. A passenger, who acts as a representative of society, reveals his ignorance

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