Ready to Kill
Ready to Kill - fact Summary
Critique Rooted in Labor Politics
Sandburg’s poem condemns a bronze memorial of a celebrated general and rejects its heroic, martial image. The speaker urges honoring farmers, miners, factory hands and other workers who sustain life rather than glorifying killers. The poem links public commemoration with social values, insisting that workers’ contributions deserve visible recognition before military triumphalism can be accepted. Its tone combines anger, moral clarity, and democratic populism.
Read Complete AnalysesTEN minutes now I have been looking at this. I have gone by here before and wondered about it. This is the bronze memorial of a famous general riding horseback with a flag and a sword and a revolver on him. I want to smash the whole thing into a pile of junk to be hauled away to the scrap yard. I put it straight to you, after the farmer, the miner, the shop man, the factory hand, the fireman and the teamster, have all been remembered with bronze memorials, shaping them on the job and getting all of us something to eat and something to wear, when they stack a few silhouettes against the sky here in the park, and show the real huskies that are doing the work of the world, and feeding people instead of butchering them, then maybe I will stand here and look easy at this general of the army holding a flag in the air, and riding like hell on horseback, ready to kill anybody that gets in his way, ready to run the red blood and slush the bowels of men all over the sweet new grass of the prairie.
Feel free to be first to leave comment.