Carl Sandburg – Four Autumn Poems

Under the Harvest Moon Through Autumn Movement

Sep 5, 2009 Martin G. Wood

The following four poems by the great American poet Carl Sandburg, come tied together by the autumnal equinox, but also compliment one another in more subtle ways.

Carl Sandburg wrote mostly in free verse, on all manner of human experience, often using recurrent themes, and even recurrent words and phrases (e.g. crimson).

The Pulitzer Prize winning poet recognized the beauty of reusing words, phrases, and imagery, in establishing symmetry for the reader; a comforting sort of familiarity, like the seasons of the year.

Under the Harvest Moon

This piece could actually be called Under the Harvest Moon and Under the Summer Roses; because Sandburg delivers two distinct poems in one, contrasting autumn, as the season of death, haunted by melancholy ghosts; with summer, a living, breathing thing, of delicacy and sweetness:

When the flagrant crimson

Lurks in the dusk...

The summer season offers walking, talking metaphoric flowers; delicately tapping the shoulders of unsuspecting souls, with optimism and hope:

Beautiful, unanswerable questions.

But, what Sandburg does brilliantly, with graceful skill, is to insinuate the high drama inherent in the change from summer to fall; from life to death; from happening to remembering:

Under the harvest moon…

Death, the gray mocker

Comes and whispers to you

As a beautiful friend

Who remembers.

Three Pieces on the Smoke of Autumn

A pastoral poem in every sense, in the beginning, Three Pieces on the Smoke of Autumn reads like the notes to a nature documentary, albeit a beautifully written nature documentary:

Three muskrats swim west…

There is a sheet of red ember glow on the river; it is dusk…

But, after a parenthetical acknowledgement of weightier matters of war and strife, it soon becomes clear Mr. Sandburg is laying the groundwork for an exquisitely executed Zen-like meditation:

I lean on an ash and watch the lights fall, the red ember glow…

Not any hate, not any love.

Not anything but dreams.

Brother of dusk and umber.

Crimson

There may not be a more poetic color to represent autumn than the color crimson, the color of blood and rust; and to peruse the works of Carl Sandburg, one would have to believe he felt the same.

Sandburg’s poem, Crimson, is one of several poems in which the poet chose the color to express himself, including the previously considered Three Pieces on the Smoke of Autumn.

Other crimson colored poems by Sandburg: Rusty Crimson (an ode to a working-class Christmas), Crimson Rambler (a superstitious soul is overcome by the ominous red rose), Crimson Changes People (a meditation on the blood of war), and Flash Crimson (an odd vignette about masochism and/or martyrdom).

But, it is the simply titled, Crimson, that best captures the melancholic, meditative mood of autumn; as the poet perfectly and compactly ponders his life above ground, as his friend lies below:

CRIMSON is the slow smolder of the cigar end I hold…

I sit here in cumbering shadows

and smoke and watch my thoughts come and go…

Autumn Movement

In Autumn Movement, Carl Sandburg poignantly laments the transient nature of things, as in the fall of the year; gorgeously evoking the emotional reckoning all human beings must endure in their twilight:

I CRIED over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts...

Read Under the Harvest Moon, Three Pieces on the Smoke of Autumn, Crimson, Autumn Movement, and other Carl Sandburg poems in their entirety at FamousPoetsandPoems.com

The copyright of the article Carl Sandburg – Four Autumn Poems in Poetry is owned by Martin G. Wood. Permission to republish Carl Sandburg – Four Autumn Poems in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Carl Sandburg

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