Bricklayer Love
Bricklayer Love - context Summary
From Smoke and Steel, 1920
Published in Sandburg's 1920 collection Smoke and Steel, "Bricklayer Love" places a working-class speaker at the center of a concise, plainspoken statement. The poem links manual labor, frustrated desire, and stoic endurance: the bricklayer contemplates suicide over an unreciprocated love yet returns to his work with steadier hands and slower songs. Its context in Smoke and Steel highlights Sandburg's focus on industrial life and ordinary voices.
Read Complete AnalysesI thought of killing myself because I am only a bricklayer and you a woman who loves the man who runs a drug store. I don't care like I used to; I lay bricks straighter than I used to and I sing slower handling the trowel afternoons. When the sun is in my eyes and the ladders are shaky and the mortar boards go wrong, I think of you.
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