Grass

“Grass” has an eccentric, idiosyncratic form reflecting Carl Sandburg’s commitment, beginning at Lombard College, to the intricate open-verse experiments pioneered by Walt Whitman. Formally, “Grass” is an 11-line, three-stanza poem: an opening three-line stanza (a tercet), then a six-line stanza (a sestet), and a closing two-line stanza (a couplet).

But there is a subtle argument to the poem’s eccentric, apparently arbitrary form. The poem itself appears to be shaped like a loaded gun, pointing left off the page, and it seems as if it floats in a kind of free, white space. The lines are irregular, with Lines 3 and 8-11 moving the left margin way over to the right to create additional blocks of white space that develop the overall shape. Looked at from a certain perspective, Lines 1-3 resemble a scope, and the barrel is pointed, ready to fire, an appropriate warning in a poem that cautions against the brutality of contemporary warfare. Ironically, the closing couplet, in which the grass with menacing determination demands to be allowed to do its work, functions as the grip or handle, suggesting the grass will continue to do its work as long as guns continue to do theirs.