Portrait - Analysis

A portrait made of contradictions

Sandburg’s central claim is that a real artist (or a fully alive man) is not one stable identity but a tangle of roles that don’t easily belong together. The poem keeps posing impossibilities—writing “one book in five years” or “five books in one year,” being “the painter and the thing painted”—and then treating those impossibilities as the only honest way to describe the subject. This is a portrait that refuses to sit still: the speaker wants a figure big enough to contain both the clean, public self and the dirty, private one.

The opening voice: shop talk, not solemn praise

The tone arrives as abruptly familiar: “... where are we, bo?” and “Wait-get his number.” That slangy address pulls the poem away from museum language and into street-level talk, as if the portrait is being sketched in a barber chair rather than a studio. The effect is both admiring and suspicious: the speaker sounds impressed, but also like someone checking whether the legend holds up under ordinary scrutiny.

Costume and handling: tweed, cheviot, Scotch Mist

The poem briefly “dresses” the subject: “the tweeds,” “the cheviot,” “the Scotch Mist,” and a “flame orange scarf.” These details feel tactile and consumer-specific, like a salesman’s inventory. The phrase “barber shop handling” makes the refinement slightly performative—something shaped by public grooming, by being seen. Sandburg doesn’t condemn the costume, but he places it early so the poem can pivot into what clothing can’t explain.

The turn: compassion that goes where style won’t

“Yet there is more” is the poem’s hinge, and after it the portrait deepens into a catalog of closeness with the rejected and unlucky. This man “sleeps under bridges” with “lonely crazy men,” sits in “country jails” with “bootleggers,” and even “adopts the children” of “broken-down burlesque actresses.” The list makes him sound almost impossibly available—present at the raw edges of other people’s lives. He “cried a heart of tears” for “Windy MacPherson’s father,” a name specific enough to feel like local grief, not a grand abstraction. And the most intimate, ambiguous detail—he “pencils wrists” of “lonely women”—suggests tenderness that might also be intrusion, art-making that might also be taking.

The poem’s key tension: sympathy or self-mythology?

Sandburg builds a tension between genuine empathy and the danger of turning other people into material for a “portrait.” To “sleep under bridges” and “sit in country jails” could be solidarity, but it could also be tourism of hardship—the artist borrowing intensity. Even “penciling” wrists hints at the artist’s tool leaving its mark on someone else’s body. The poem doesn’t resolve this contradiction; it lets the sheer range of the man’s claimed life raise the question of whether such range is morally expansive or quietly extractive.

Chicago skyscraper versus Iowa harnessmaker

The ending compresses the whole argument into one plain, aching question: can one person “sit at a desk” in a “skyscraper in Chicago” and also be “a harnessmaker” in an Iowa corn town—still feeling “the tall grass” in June and the “ache of the cottonwood trees” singing in “the prairie wind”? The question isn’t just about geography; it’s about whether memory and imagination can keep faith with origins while the body lives elsewhere. Sandburg’s portrait ends not with certainty but with a test: is this man’s many-sidedness a true widening of the self, or the impossible wish to be everywhere without paying the cost of choosing one life?