Neighbors
Neighbors - meaning Summary
Urban Neighbors Observed
Sandburg sketches a bustling city corner where a rickety frame house serves as a church and orphan refuge while across the street a Greek coffeehouse buzzes with foreign talk. The poem contrasts physical decay and social care with immigrant life and conversations about work and distant places, suggesting a crowded, multilingual urban neighborhood where survival, faith, and labor coexist in close proximity.
Read Complete AnalysesOn Forty-first Street near Eighth Avenue a frame house wobbles. If houses went on crutches this house would be one of the cripples. A sign on the house: Church of the Living God And Rescue Home for Orphan Children. From a Greek coffee house Across the street A cabalistic jargon Jabbers back. And men at tables Spill Peloponnesian syllables And speak of shovels for street work. And the new embankments of the Erie Railroad At Painted Post, Horse's Head, Salamanca.
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