And This Will Be All
And This Will Be All - meaning Summary
Facing Permanent Silence
Sandburg's short lyric contemplates absolute finality and human absence. The speaker imagines locked gates, wind and dust taking over, and mountains indifferent to longing. Repeated questions and images of moaning October emphasize solitude and the erasure of voices and songs. The poem resists resolution, posing whether anything remains but mute nature and memory, and foregrounds the ache of wanting permanence in the face of inevitable disappearance.
Read Complete AnalysesAnd this will be all? And the gates will never open again? And the dust and the wind will play around the rusty door hinges and the songs of October moan, Why-oh, why-oh? And you will look to the mountains And the mountains will look to you And you will wish you were a mountain And the mountain will wish nothing at all? This will be all? The gates will never-never open again? The dust and the wind only And the rusty door hinges and moaning October And Why-oh, why-oh, in the moaning dry leaves, This will be all? Nothing in the air but songs And no singers, no mouths to know the songs? You tell us a woman with a heartache tells you it is so? This will be all?
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