American poet, historian, novelist and folklorist, 'the singing bard', Carl Sandburg wrote mostly in free verse, on all manner of human experience, often using recurrent themes, and even recurrent words and phrases. In his work Sandburg gave voice to the people of the Midwestern and played a significant role in the development in poetry that took place during the first two decades of the 20th century. The poet recognized the beauty of reusing words, phrases, and imagery, in establishing symmetry for the reader; a comforting sort of familiarity, like the seasons of the year.

Under the Harvest Moon

This piece could actually be called Under the Harvest Moon and Under the Summer Roses; because Sandburg delivers two distinct poems in one, contrasting autumn, as the season of death, haunted by melancholy ghosts; with summer, a living, breathing thing, of delicacy and sweetness. The summer season offers walking, talking metaphoric flowers; delicately tapping the shoulders of unsuspecting souls, with optimism and hope, but what Sandburg does brilliantly, with graceful skill, is to insinuate the high drama inherent in the change from summer to fall; from life to death; from happening to remembering.

Under the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.

Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.

Three Pieces on the Smoke of Autumn

A pastoral poem in every sense, in the beginning, Three Pieces on the Smoke of Autumn reads like the notes to a nature documentary, albeit a beautifully written nature documentary. But, after a parenthetical acknowledgement of weightier matters of war and strife, it soon becomes clear Mr. Sandburg is laying the groundwork for an exquisitely executed Zen-like meditation.

SMOKE of autumn is on it all.
The streamers loosen and travel.
The red west is stopped with a gray haze.
They fill the ash trees, they wrap the oaks,
They make a long-tailed rider
In the pocket of the first, the earliest evening star.. . .
Three muskrats swim west on the Desplaines River.

There is a sheet of red ember glow on the river; it is dusk; and the muskrats one by one go on patrol routes west.

Around each slippery padding rat, a fan of ripples; in the silence of dusk a faint wash of ripples, the padding of the rats going west, in a dark and shivering river gold.

(A newspaper in my pocket says the Germans pierce the Italian line; I have letters from poets and sculptors in Greenwich Village; I have letters from an ambulance man in France and an I. W. W. man in Vladivostok.)

I lean on an ash and watch the lights fall, the red ember glow, and three muskrats swim west in a fan of ripples on a sheet of river gold.. . .
Better the blue silence and the gray west,
The autumn mist on the river,
And not any hate and not any love,
And not anything at all of the keen and the deep:
Only the peace of a dog head on a barn floor,
And the new corn shoveled in bushels
And the pumpkins brought from the corn rows,
Umber lights of the dark,
Umber lanterns of the loam dark.

Here a dog head dreams.
Not any hate, not any love.
Not anything but dreams.
Brother of dusk and umber.

Crimson

There may not be a more poetic color to represent autumn than the color crimson, the color of blood and rust; and to peruse the works of Carl Sandburg, one would have to believe he felt the same. Sandburg’s poem, Crimson, is one of several poems in which the poet chose the color to express himself, including the previously considered Three Pieces on the Smoke of Autumn. Other crimson colored poems by Sandburg: Rusty Crimson (an ode to a working-class Christmas), Crimson Rambler (a superstitious soul is overcome by the ominous red rose), Crimson Changes People (a meditation on the blood of war), and Flash Crimson (an odd vignette about masochism and/or martyrdom). But, it is the simply titled, Crimson, that best captures the melancholic, meditative mood of autumn; as the poet perfectly and compactly ponders his life above ground, as his friend lies below.

CRIMSON is the slow smolder of the cigar end I hold,
Gray is the ash that stiffens and covers all silent the fire.
(A great man I know is dead and while he lies in his
coffin a gone flame I sit here in cumbering shadows
and smoke and watch my thoughts come and go.)

Autumn Movement

In Autumn Movement, Carl Sandburg poignantly laments the transient nature of things, as in the fall of the year; gorgeously evoking the emotional reckoning all human beings must endure in their twilight.

I CRIED over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts.

The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper sunburned woman, the mother of the year, the taker of seeds.

The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes, new beautiful things come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind, and the old things go, not one lasts.