Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania - meaning Summary
Industry and Rural Life
The poem contrasts rural moments and industrial labor in Pennsylvania. Sandburg shifts between small-town images—boys at play, a mounted constabulary, laughing hills—and gritty work scenes of coal, iron, steel machinery and anxious miner’s wives. The speaker records both the human rhythms of community life and the visual impressions of industry, ending with painterly "color studies" that meld beauty and soot in a sunset over mining domes.
Read Complete AnalysesI have been in Pennsylvania, In the Monongahela and Hocking Valleys. In the blue Susquehanna On a Saturday morning I saw a mounted constabulary go by, I saw boys playing marbles. Spring and the hills laughed. And in places Along the Appalachian chain, I saw steel arms handling coal and iron, And I saw the white-cauliflower faces Of miner's wives waiting for the men to come home from the day's work. I made color studies in crimson and violet Over the dust and domes of culm at sunset.
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