Do You Want Affidavits - Analysis

The poem’s dare: proof demanded for the obviously impossible

Sandburg’s central move is a taunt: he stages a world where people ask for legal proof of things that are plainly outside proof, then uses that demand to expose how thin certainty can be. The refrain Do you want affidavits? comes right after claims like There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea and a man in the moon with money—statements that are half nursery-rhyme, half scam pitch. By pairing cosmic or absurd images with courtroom language, the poem suggests that the hunger for verification doesn’t always come from reason; it can come from fear, gullibility, or a desire to outsource belief to an authority stamp.

The tone is brisk and needling, like someone who’s been asked one too many times to prove what can’t be proved—and decides to answer by exaggerating the whole situation until it looks ridiculous.

Wish-images that sound like bribes

The fantasies keep escalating, and they’re not neutral fantasies; they feel like offers designed to hook you. A man in the moon brings money; ten dancing girls wait in a sea-chamber off Nantucket; tall candles in Timbuctoo burn penance for you. Each promise is aimed at a different appetite: greed, pleasure, relief from guilt. That repeated for you matters: the poem makes wishing look self-centered, almost transactional, as if the world’s wonders exist to be notarized and delivered to the reader’s doorstep.

Even the geography feels chosen for its seductive unreality. Nantucket is concrete and coastal; Timbuctoo is a cliché for the faraway. The poem slides between the familiar and the mythic, as if to show how easily we let distance turn into credulity.

The hinge: from playful nonsense to the machinery of law

The poem turns sharply at There are-anything else? Suddenly the speaker isn’t just riffing; he’s managing a counter, taking orders, pushing the buyer to speak up. Then comes the strangest setting: the great wishing windows, where the law says we are free to wish all this week. The language becomes bureaucratic—time-limited permission, regulated freedom. The speaker implies that even imagination has been absorbed into a system: you may desire, but only at the designated window, and only during the approved week.

This is where the poem’s satire sharpens. It isn’t merely mocking people who want affidavits; it’s hinting that modern life trains us to treat everything—truth, hope, longing—as something administered by an institution.

The core contradiction: sworn truth used to certify unreality

The closing question, Shall I raise my right hand, pushes the poem’s central tension into the open: what happens when the rituals of truth are used to validate what we already know is wish-stuff? The speaker offers to swear in the monotone of a notary public, and then recites the courtroom formula the truth the whole truth nothing but the truth. It’s funny, but the joke has teeth. A notary’s monotone is the sound of authority without feeling; the poem suggests that certainty can become a performance, a tone of voice and a raised hand, rather than a relationship to reality.

At the same time, the poem doesn’t entirely despise wishing. The phrase wishing windows has a tender brightness. The contradiction is that the poem both invites the pleasure of impossible images and warns how easily that pleasure can be packaged, sold, and certified.

A sharper question the poem leaves hanging

If we insist on affidavits for wonders, are we really protecting ourselves from lies—or just admitting we can’t trust our own judgment without a stamp? The speaker’s final offer of an oath feels less like reassurance than an exposure: it shows how badly we want the comfort of procedure, even when procedure can only certify a story.