Women Washing Their Hair
Women Washing Their Hair - context Summary
Published in 1920
This short lyric appears in Carl Sandburg’s 1920 collection Smoke and Steel. It frames a simple domestic scene—women washing their hair—as an occasion to acknowledge sustaining natural forces, especially sun and rain. Plentiful, direct imagery links everyday beauty to elemental cycles, while the repeated opening line gives the poem a chantlike, communal tone. Its placement in Smoke and Steel situates it among poems attentive to ordinary labor and natural provision.
Read Complete AnalysesThey have painted and sung the women washing their hair, and the plaits and strands in the sun, and the golden combs and the combs of elephant tusks and the combs of buffalo horn and hoof. The sun has been good to women, drying their heads of hair as they stooped and shook their shoulders and framed their faces with copper and framed their eyes with dusk or chestnut. The rain has been good to women. If the rain should forget, if the rain left off for a year— the heads of women would wither, the copper, the dusk and chestnuts, go. They have painted and sung the women washing their hair— reckon the sun and rain in, too.
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