Carl Sandburg

Band Concert

Band Concert - form Summary

Free Verse Public-square Scene

Sandburg uses unadorned free verse and a loose, accumulative rhythm to recreate a small-town band concert. Short phrases and vivid, concrete details are strung together without formal meter or rhyme, producing a conversational, panoramic snapshot that mixes sounds, sights and social types. The lack of formal constraint lets the poem move fluidly from comic moments to quieter, sensory closing lines, emphasizing communal life over poetic artifice.

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Band concert public square Nebraska city. Flowing and circling dresses, summer-white dresses. Faces, flesh tints flung like sprays of cherry blossoms. And gigglers, God knows, gigglers, rivaling the pony whinnies of the Livery Stable Blues. Cowboy rags and nigger rags. And boys driving sorrel horses hurl a cornfield laughter at the girls in dresses, summer-white dresses. Amid the cornet staccato and the tuba oompa, gigglers, God knows, gigglers daffy with life’s razzle dazzle. Slow good-night melodies and Home Sweet Home. And the snare drummer bookkeeper in a hardware store nods hello to the daughter of a railroad conductor—a giggler, God knows, a giggler—and the summer-white dresses filter fanwise out of the public square. The crushed strawberries of ice cream soda places, the night wind in cottonwoods and willows, the lattice shadows of doorsteps and porches, these know more of the story.

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