Graves
Graves - meaning Summary
Loneliness and Collective Forgetting
The poem imagines an isolated individual who opposes a crowd and is scorned for years, dying with only an undertaker present at his funeral. Sandburg contrasts the lone life and anonymous death with the simultaneous burial of the thousand who mocked him, using recurring images of flowers and wind to suggest nature’s impartial erasure. The closing line acknowledges a bitter affection for the world’s capacity to forget both insult and sacrifice.
Read Complete AnalysesI dreamed one man stood against a thousand, One man damned as a wrongheaded fool. One year and another he walked the streets, And a thousand shrugs and hoots Met him in the shoulders and mouths he passed. He died alone. And only the undertaker came to his funeral. Flowers grow over his grave anod in the wind, And over the graves of the thousand, too, The flowers grow anod in the wind. Flowers and the wind, Flowers anod over the graves of the dead, Petals of red, leaves of yellow, streaks of white, Masses of purple sagging. . . I love you and your great way of forgetting.
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