The Answer
The Answer - context Summary
Published in 1920 Collection
"The Answer" was published in Carl Sandburg s 1920 collection Smoke and Steel. The short lyric presents silence as a revealing force, using plain, nature-based imagery to suggest that quiet underlies growth and understanding. As printed in the postwar 1920 volume, the poem fits the collection s spare language and interest in everyday scenes, presenting a calm, almost religious confidence in silence as a source of meaning.
Read Complete AnalysesYou have spoken the answer. A child searches far sometimes Into the red dust On a dark rose leaf And so you have gone far For the answer is: Silence. In the republic Of the winking stars and spent cataclysms Sure we are it is off there the answer is hidden and folded over, Sleeping in the sun, careless whether it is Sunday or any other day of the week, Knowing silence will bring all one way or another. Have we not seen Purple of the pansy out of the mulch and mold crawl into a dusk of velvet? blur of yellow? Almost we thought from nowhere but it was the silence, the future, working.
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