Grass Carl Sandburg Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work�                           I am the grass; I cover all.  And pile them high at Gettysburg And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun                        5 Shove them under and let me work. Two years, ten years, and the passengers ask the        conductor:                         What place is this?                         Where are we now?                               10                              I am the grass.                              Let me work.

Analysis The speaker in the poem is grass. Because the grass has been given the ability to speak, this poem has the element of personification. The audience is the human beings who continuously need grass in order to hide the atrocities they constantly create. The purpose of this poem is to reveal the characteristic of a basic element that most people would not consider. Most people would not realize that grass is nature�s band-aid. It hides the atrocities that man has created and brings a great appreciation for grass itself. Without grass, the world would be a bloody graveyard of rotting and rotten corpses. Sandburg achieves this purpose by giving a sense of historical background through the names of the various battles. Through these names, he gives an effective The first stanza encourages the dumping of dead bodies. The grass seems to have accepted its eternal duty to be a sheet to hide the pain and destruction of mankind. The allusions to the historical events of Austerlitz and Waterloo prove that no matter how high the death toll, the grass will �cover all� (3). Lines 4-5 name three more bloody battles. Gettysburg had brothers fighting against each other while Ypres and Verdun were the sites of the first use of chemical warfare. These battles created much destruction and many lives were lost. These battles are all very significant and every person is expected to remember them. However, lines 7-10 state that grass has done such a marvelous job of hiding the bloody battlefield that passengers riding in a train cross country are unable to determine these sites as historical monuments. They are unaware that thousands of lives were sacrificed in order for them to pass through the site freely. These people are so clueless that they must ask the conductor what these grassy sites are. The last two lines of the poem is the grass trying to convince readers to let him do his job of covering wounds. The grass wants to conceal the dirty side of mankind in order to allow human beings to continue with their lives instead of dwelling on the deformed past. Sandburg�s message in the poem is to tell readers that these events are important to the foundation of civilization throughout the world, but they are not events that should be commemorated by displaying the corpses of deceased heroes in public eye. The grass serves as a symbol of concealment as well as beauty. The grass, physically, is pleasing to the eye. It serves as a covering sheet for the ugliness in the world. Once the external beauty is set into place, people no longer question the previous events or inhabitants of the land. They only see the simplicity of the beauty of the grass and nothing else.

poem taken from An Anthology of World Poetry edited by Mark Van Doren (1936).