Carl Sandburg

Summer Shirt Sale

Summer Shirt Sale - meaning Summary

Retail as Urban Spectacle

The poem depicts a downtown haberdasher’isplaying a noisy summer shirt sale as a bright, theatrical street spectacle. Window signs and colorful patterns are personified as explosions and fighters that draw a mixed crowd. The scene turns commerce into communal performance, energizing the street and confronting an ambiguous "ghost" figure associated with paydays, suggesting the sale’oth animates and tests everyday economic life.

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THE SUMMER shirt sale of a downtown haberdasher is glorified in a show-window slang: everybody understands the language: red dots, yellow circles, blue anchors, and dove-brown hooks, these perform explosions in color: stripes and checks fight for the possession of front lines and salients: detectives, newsies, teameoes, niggers, all stop, look, and listen: the shirt sale and the show window kick at the street with a noise joyous as a clog dancer: the ensemble is a challenge to the ghost who walks on paydays.

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