Baby Toes

Baby Toes - context Summary

Chicago Poems, 1916

Published in Sandburg’s 1916 collection Chicago Poems and addressed to his daughter Janet, the short lyric frames distance and time as celestial journeys. Two stars—one closer, one farther—are measured in years at an imagined speed of a hundred miles an hour. The poem poses a simple choice between nearer and more distant futures, conveying parental longing, the passage of time, and a child's place in an expansive, unknowable universe.