Broken Tabernacles
Broken Tabernacles - context Summary
Published in 1916
Published in the 1916 collection Chicago Poems, Sandburg’s brief piece uses religious imagery to voice confusion and moral questioning. The speaker admits to tearing down “smaller tabernacles” and wonders if greater, lasting structures will replace them. He confronts the beauty of those structures while accusing hypocrites who inscribed themselves upon them, ending with an ambiguous refusal to assign blame. The poem reads as a terse meditation on destruction, faith, and hypocrisy.
Read Complete AnalysesHave I broken the smaller tabernacles, O Lord? And in the destruction of these set up the greater and massive, the everlasting tabernacles? I know nothing today, what I have done and why, O Lord, only I have broken and broken tabernacles. They were beautiful in a way, these tabernacles torn down by strong hands swearing— They were beautiful— why did the hypocrites carve their own names on the corner-stones? Why did the hypocrites keep on singing their own names in their long noses every Sunday in these tabernacles? Who lays any blame here among the split cornerstones?
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