Murmurings in a Field Hospital
Murmurings in a Field Hospital - form Summary
Free Verse for Intimacy
Sandburg uses free verse and plain diction to create an urgent, conversational voice that shifts from a terse wartime image to yearning for small domestic beauties. The lack of strict meter or rhyme lets sentences run into images—playthings, flowers, butter—so memory and wish blend without formal interruption. This loose structure mirrors the speaker’scaping brutality and seeking consolation in intimate, ordinary scenes that feel immediate and reclaimed.
Read Complete Analyses[They picked him up in the grass where he had lain two days in the rain with a piece of shrapnel in his lungs.] Come to me only with playthings now. . . A picture of a singing woman with blue eyes Standing at a fence of hollyhocks, poppies and sunflowers. . . Or an old man I remember sitting with children telling stories Of days that never happened anywhere in the world. . . No more iron cold and real to handle, Shaped for a drive straight ahead. Bring me only beautiful useless things. Only old home things touched at sunset in the quiet. . . And at the window one day in summer Yellow of the new crock of butter Stood against the red of new climbing roses. . . And the world was all playthings.
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