Questionnaire - Analysis

A self-interrogation that doubts its own innocence

Sandburg’s central move is to stage morality as a cross-examination, not a confession. The speaker doesn’t declare what he has done; he asks whether he has done it, as if he doesn’t trust his own self-story. The repeated Have I turns the poem into a kind of internal courtroom where the defendant is also the prosecutor. What emerges isn’t a list of crimes so much as a fear that everyday respectability can hide petty cruelty, vanity, and hypocrisy.

The tone is brisk and streetwise—plain-spoken enough to sound honest—yet the very plainness can feel like a dodge. By keeping everything in questions, the poem suggests a mind that wants the cleansing effect of scrutiny without the finality of a verdict.

Small corruptions, big consequences

The first questions move from the bluntly political to the almost comic: told any man to be a liar sits beside selling ice to the poor in summer and coal to the poor in winter. That pairing matters. Sandburg frames exploitation as opportunism that targets basic human need—heat and cold—so the wrongdoing isn’t abstract. It’s a person choosing profit over someone else’s survival.

Then the poem swerves into a grotesque, vivid image of status display: daughters who nursed brindle bull terriers and parade them in plaid wool jackets. The absurd specificity sharpens the accusation: luxury becomes not just excess but a kind of moral blindness, where tenderness is lavished on dressed-up animals while the poor are treated as markets. The humor here is barbed; it ridicules a class habit and implies the speaker might be connected to it, if not directly responsible for it.

Talk, booze, and the everyday bullying of charm

After material exploitation, the poem turns to social harm. The speaker asks if he has given an earful too much of his talk or pressured someone into a snootful of booze on my account. These lines accuse a softer kind of coercion: the way a confident voice can take up more than its share of air, the way sociability can become insistence. The colloquial phrases make the offenses sound ordinary—and that’s part of the poem’s bite. Sandburg implies that ethical failure often arrives dressed as personality: the talker who won’t stop, the friend who won’t let you say no.

Listening as a moral test

The poem’s most intimate self-accusation may be about hearing. Have I put wool in my own ears when others tried to tell him what was good for me? Have I been a bum listener? The image of stuffing one’s ears is almost childish, but the question is adult: am I teachable, or do I use stubbornness as a shield?

This creates a key tension in the poem: the speaker wants to be judged—and maybe purified—yet he worries he has been the sort of person who refuses counsel. If he has been a bum listener, then even this questionnaire could be theater, another performance of concern that doesn’t change anything.

Hypocrisy: preaching retribution while taking dollars

The harshest charge arrives with money and public speech. The speaker asks if he has taken dollars from the living and the unborn while making speeches about retributions that follow the dishonest. Here Sandburg links moral rhetoric to exploitation across time: taking from the unborn suggests debt, plundered futures, or policies that mortgage tomorrow for today’s applause. The poem’s logic is pointed: it’s easy to condemn dishonesty in public while benefiting from it in private, and the more grandly one talks about punishment, the more suspicious one should be of what one is hiding.

The final question: doing good, or doing publicity?

The ending tightens into a blunt opposition: Have I done any good under cover? Or have I put it in the show windows and the newspapers? This is the poem’s clearest turn toward motive. It’s not enough to do good; the speaker worries he has needed it to be seen. The phrase show windows makes charity sound like merchandise—something arranged for display—so even virtue becomes implicated in the same marketplace that sold ice and coal to the poor.

If the poem offers any hope, it’s only the hope contained in the act of asking: a refusal to let good intentions stand unexamined. But the questions also leave a sting: what if the need to appear decent is precisely what keeps a person from becoming decent when no one is watching?