Pick Offs
Pick Offs - meaning Summary
Fragments Gathered by Perception
Sandburg's poem shows how instruments and senses "pick off" fragments of the world—starlight, speech, memories—and transmit them to the speaker. These captured scraps form a disjointed, cinematic sequence: historical echoes, mundane figures, and palace imagery collapse into a final vision of a rock island and sea-walls. The poem suggests perception and technology both gather and distance experience, producing a condensed, portable but isolating view of reality and mortality.
Read Complete AnalysesTHE TELESCOPE picks off star dust on the clean steel sky and sends it to me. The telephone picks off my voice and sends it cross country a thousand miles. The eyes in my head pick off pages of Napoleon memoirs ... a rag handler, a head of dreams walks in a sheet of mist ... the palace panels shut in nobodies drinking nothings out of silver helmets ... in the end we all come to a rock island and the hold of the sea-walls.
Feel free to be first to leave comment.