Carl Sandburg

Handfuls

Handfuls - meaning Summary

Life as Brief Cycles

The poem reflects on birth, mortality and cyclical time. Children arrive as bright, fragile "blossoms," lively and risk-taking, then are swept through seasons of life. The same hands that once held newborns end up empty as those lives return to the earth. Simple seasonal and earth imagery compresses life into a brief arc, emphasizing impermanence and the recurring pattern of arrival and decay.

Read Complete Analyses

BLOSSOMS of babies Blinking their stories Come soft On the dusk and the babble; Little red gamblers, Handfuls that slept in the dust. Summers of rain, Winters of drift, Tell off the years; And they go back Who came soft- Back to the sod, To silence and dust; Gray gamblers, Handfuls again.

default user
PoetryVerse just now

Feel free to be first to leave comment.

8/2200 - 0