Under a Telephone Pole
Under a Telephone Pole - context Summary
From Chicago Poems
Placed in Sandburg’s Chicago Poems, this brief lyric adopts the voice of a copper telephone wire to register urban life. The wire claims to carry the daily range of human experience — work, love, money, death, laughter — indifferent yet intimate. The poem frames modern city bustle through a single mundane object, suggesting technology as a steady conduit for the private and public sounds of a growing industrial metropolis.
Read Complete AnalysesI am a copper wire slung in the air, Slim against the sun I make not even a clear line of shadow. Night and day I keep singing--humming and thrumming: It is love and war and money; it is the fighting and the tears, the work and want, Death and laughter of men and women passing through me, carrier of your speech, In the rain and the wet dripping, in the dawn and the shine drying, A copper wire.
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