Jabberers - Analysis

Language as a way of surfacing

The poem’s central claim is that speech is a kind of surfacing from the self—necessary, instinctive, and yet strangely futile once it leaves the mouth. The opening line, I RISE out of my depths with my language, makes talking sound like coming up for air. It isn’t casual conversation; it’s the self hauling something up from below. When the speaker repeats the same sentence for you, he grants the other person the same interior life and the same compulsion to speak. But the repetition also hints at a stalemate: both parties keep rising with words, and the rising itself doesn’t guarantee meeting.

Two tongues that don’t match

Sandburg quickly turns the dialogue into a mismatch of creatures: the two languages are alike only as a yellow cat and a green parrot are alike. Both are vivid, alive, even comic—but they are not built to understand each other. A cat stalks; a parrot mimics. That comparison suggests that even when two people speak “English,” their talk may come from different instincts: one predatory and wordless, the other noisy and imitative. The result is not conversation but collision—staccato tantalizations flung into a wildcat jabber. The tone here is half-amused, half-worn out: the speaker can hear the energy in their talk, but he also hears how quickly it becomes mere sound.

A fragile web of questions that won’t be answered

What makes the jabber troubling is what it floats over: a gossamer web of unanswerables. The image is delicate—gossamer, web—yet the content is heavy. Their words don’t land on solid ground; they snag on questions that can’t be resolved. This creates the poem’s key tension: language is the tool they have for reaching each other, but it is also the thing that exposes how unreachable certain things are. Their “tantalizations” tempt meaning—almost-sense, almost-connection—without delivering it.

The hinge: the praise of silence and the fear of more noise

The poem turns when the speaker unexpectedly prefers quiet: The second and the third silence, even the hundredth silence, is better than none. The counting makes silence feel like something practiced, accumulated, earned—like the pauses after failed attempts. Yet even this wisdom is unstable. The parenthetical doubt—Maybe this is a jabber too—undercuts the speaker’s authority, as if any sentence about silence becomes one more sentence clogging the air. The tone shifts into self-suspicion: he wants a clean exit from talk, but he can’t stop talking long enough to achieve it. The poem admits the trap in real time: trying to diagnose jabber may itself be jabber.

Time as the indifferent gulf that swallows talk

When the opening lines return, they sound less like a fresh start and more like a loop: both people rise again, compelled again. Then comes the bleakest widening of the frame: One thing there is much of, and its name is time. Into this gulf their syllabic pronunciamentos empty—grand words reduced to discharge. The simile of rockets of fire curving and vanishing makes speech briefly spectacular but quickly gone, leaving no lasting light. The final comparison—jabberings like the shower at a scissors grinder’s wheel—adds a harsher edge: sparks fly, noise happens, metal grinds, but the work is mechanical and the brightness is only friction.

What if the poem’s honesty is its most human jabber?

The poem keeps asking whether any talk can be more than sparks and rockets—brief flare, quick disappearance. But it also refuses to pretend the answer is simple. By letting the speaker question himself mid-poem, Sandburg suggests that the most accurate speech may be the one that admits its own likely failure, even as it rises again from the depths because it has no other way to be heard.