Pencils
Pencils - meaning Summary
Creation and Endlessness
The poem presents pencils as instruments that begin and end stories while pointing toward unknowable origins and destinations. Sandburg mixes domestic imagery with cosmic scenes—stars, sea horses, shooting stars—to suggest creative urges that never fully cease or resolve. The speaker observes efforts to name and fix life, admits their limits, and responds to persistent calls from mysterious futures and flashes of inspiration with an invitation to return and continue searching.
Read Complete Analysestelling where the wind comes from open a story. Pencils telling where the wind goes end a story. These eager pencils come to a stop .. only.. when the stars high over come to a stop. Out of cabalistic to-morrows come cryptic babies calling life a strong and a lovely thing. I have seen neither these nor the stars high over come to a stop. Neither these nor the sea horses running with the clocks of the moon. Nor even a shooting star snatching a pencil of fire writing a curve of gold and white. Like you.. I counted the shooting stars of a winter night and my head was dizzy with all of them calling one by one: Look for us again.
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