Languages
Languages - context Summary
From Chicago Poems (1916)
Published in Carl Sandburg's 1916 collection Chicago Poems, "Languages" is a short free-verse meditation on linguistic change. Sandburg compares language to rivers and wind to stress its instability, mortality, and tendency to cross borders and morph over time. The poem functions as a cultural observation rather than a historical claim, fitting the collection's modernist interest in everyday speech and the flux of American life at the start of the twentieth century.
Read Complete AnalysesTHERE are no handles upon a language Whereby men take hold of it And mark it with signs for its remembrance. It is a river, this language, Once in a thousand years Breaking a new course Changing its way to the ocean. It is mountain effluvia Moving to valleys And from nation to nation Crossing borders and mixing. Languages die like rivers. Words wrapped round your tongue today And broken to shape of thought Between your teeth and lips speaking Now and today Shall be faded hieroglyphics Ten thousand years from now. Sing--and singing--remember Your song dies and changes And is not here to-morrow Any more than the wind Blowing ten thousand years ago.
Feel free to be first to leave comment.