They Buy With An Eye To Looks - Analysis

Love as a souvenir you can hang on a wall

Sandburg’s central move is blunt: he treats love the way a rich tourist treats an exotic purchase. The opening claim—The fine cloth of your love—sounds tender until the poem immediately turns it into merchandise: a fabric of Egypt, a thing you pick up and bring home and stick on the walls. The fantasy is not just travel but ownership: the beloved becomes an artifact that proves you’ve been somewhere, spent money, and returned with something to show. Even the speaker’s imagined brag—There's a little thing made a hit with me—reduces the object of affection to a little thing, a pleasing acquisition that flatters the buyer’s taste.

Sinbad and Cairo: romance used as a sales pitch

The poem borrows adventure language—Sinbad, the sailor, robbers, Cairo—to stage how romance can be dressed up to justify possession. The exotic references feel like perfume sprayed over a transaction. The traveler is defined not by curiosity but by cash: a traveler with plenty of money. That detail matters because it sets the logic that will dominate the poem: desire is credible when it looks expensive. When the speaker says, I think I must see Cairo again some day, it sounds wistful, but it also resembles the consumer’s itch to repeat a purchase—go back to the market, buy again, refresh the thrill.

The American “phenoms” who corner everything

Mid-poem, Sandburg yanks us from distant Egypt into a very local parade of profiteers: cornice manufacturers, chewing gum kings, and Young Napoleons who corner eggs or corner cheese. The list is funny because it’s both grandiose and petty—Napoleons of dairy and breakfast. But the humor has teeth: these are people who make a habit of turning the world into inventory. The repetition of corner and the phrase more worlds to corner make greed sound like a kind of imperial appetite. Even the industrial brag—making a killing in steel, copper, permanganese—suggests that the same mind that hoards materials can also hoard people, converting intimacy into another asset.

“Have you had a look at my wife?”: the poem’s cruel reveal

The poem’s sharpest turn comes when the wealthy “collectors” show what all this acquisition is for: social display. They invite random friends in for a call—not close companions, just an audience—and then the line lands like a sales demonstration: Have you had a look at my wife? The wife is presented the way one might present a new purchase, and the language of “looks” confirms the title’s accusation: they buy with an eye to appearances. Even the proud flourish—Here she is—treats her as an item brought out from a back room. The final phrase, dolled up for fair, is especially revealing: the fair is where livestock and goods are judged, where value is assigned by spectators. In this world, “love” is not a bond; it is a costume put on a person so the owner can feel like a winner.

The chant O-ee! and the return to “fine cloth”

Sandburg ends where he began, repeating: O-ee! the fine cloth of your love might be a fabric of Egypt. The repetition works like a chant or a street-cry, half admiration and half mockery. The speaker can’t let go of how pretty the metaphor is—fine cloth, Egypt—but the poem has poisoned the compliment. By the end, “fine cloth” means the kind of beauty that makes someone want to own you. The tone is sardonic, almost sing-song, and that sing-song quality makes the critique feel more disturbing: it suggests how easily a society can normalize this talk, how casually it can turn a spouse into a showpiece.

The tension the poem refuses to resolve: beauty versus possession

The poem keeps a hard contradiction in view. It admits that love can feel like rare fabric—sensuous, admired, worth traveling for—but it also insists that the very language of rarity invites a buyer. When the men ask others to have you had a look, they treat beauty as proof of their power, not the beloved’s personhood. Sandburg doesn’t offer a rescue from this; he simply repeats the opening metaphor so we feel the trap: the more love is described as something exquisite and imported, the easier it becomes for “phenoms” to treat it as something that can be purchased, displayed, and owned.