Buttons
Buttons - context Summary
Composed During World War I
Written and published in 1916 amid World War I and included in Chicago Poems, Sandburg’s free-verse piece records a journalist-poet’s view of public detachment from wartime suffering. It contrasts a cheerful crowd moving colored buttons on a war map with a parenthetical image of men dying in a river’s red soak. The poem registers irony and social critique: the map’s game belies the real human cost Sandburg witnessed.
Read Complete AnalysesI have been watching the war map slammed up for advertising in front of the newspaper office. Buttons--red and yellow buttons--blue and black buttons-- are shoved back and forth across the map. A laughing young man, sunny with freckles, Climbs a ladder, yells a joke to somebody in the crowd, And then fixes a yellow button one inch west And follows the yellow button with a black button one inch west. (Ten thousand men and boys twist on their bodies in a red soak along a river edge, Gasping of wounds, calling for water, some rattling death in their throats.) Who would guess what it cost to move two buttons one inch on the war map here in front of the newspaper office where the freckle-faced young man is laughing to us?
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