Carl Sandburg

In Tall Grass

In Tall Grass - meaning Summary

Life, Death, and Memory

The poem evokes a rural scene where bees swarm around a horse skull in tall grass, blending images of honey, wings, and bones. It expresses a calm acceptance of mortality, inviting the bees to inhabit the speaker’s head and sleep over the bones. Memory and forgetting are posed as questions amid the drone of the bees, suggesting a cyclical movement between life, dream, and decay within a quietly elegiac pastoral setting.

Read Complete Analyses

BEES and a honeycomb in the dried head of a horse in a pasture corner-a skull in the tall grass and a buzz and a buzz of the yellow honey-hunters. And I ask no better a winding sheet (over the earth and under the sun.) Let the bees go honey-hunting with yellow blur of wings in the dome of my head, in the rumbling, singing arch of my skull. Let there be wings and yellow dust and the drone of dreams of honey-who loses and remembers?-who keeps and forgets? In a blue sheen of moon over the bones and under the hanging honeycomb the bees come home and the bees sleep.

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