The Harbor

PASSING through huddled and ugly walls
By doorways where women
Looked from their hunger-deep eyes,
Haunted with shadows of hunger-hands,
Out from the huddled and ugly walls,
I came sudden, at the city's edge,
On a blue burst of lake,
Long lake waves breaking under the sun
On a spray-flung curve of shore;
And a fluttering storm of gulls,
Masses of great gray wings
And flying white bellies
Veering and wheeling free in the open.

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967)

What I like most about Carl Sandburg is his simple style of imagery of urban America. It's straightforward and easy to enjoy. I can imagine what it might have been like for him as he walked the streets of Chicago in 1916. It's been many years since I was there but I can recall experiencing a similar transition from the closed in urban surroundings Haunted with shadows of hunger-hands, Out from the huddled and ugly walls, to the sharp cold and bitingly windy shore of Lake Michigan, the --Long lake waves breaking under the sun On a spray-flung curve of shore; And a fluttering storm of gulls, . I can easily recall standing the on the wet sand in a dark blue windbreaker and hearing the sounds of the gulls against the flapping of the man made wind-resistant material while I offered sustenance of Rainbow bread upon the waters. It is a sense of being quite overwhelmed by nature, very liberating and so well defined here by Sandburg. This isn't the first time poets have used the experience of the natural sublime, first delineated in eighteenth-century period of Enlightenment by philosophers Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke. A lot of Sandburg’s poetry compares and contrasts his direct observations between the developing technological and urban medium with its seemingly isolation from the surrounding nature. Notice that he doesn't add any color until he has reached the shore and how he goes from the eye catching blue focal point of the massive presence of the lake and invites the reader to look up where he has painted gray and white birds freely against the sky. By skillfully painting a midwestern scene he contrasts the solitude of city dwellers from the rhythms of the natural landscape and the resulting loss of the investment and spiritual connection with nature.

from Chicago Poems(1916)

Sources:

Public domain text taken from The Poets’ Corner:
http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/sandb02.html#sand3

CST Approved

Carl Sandburg	Pearl Harbor	Transition	harbour
One by one we threw our eyes into the sea	Edmund Burke	hang glider	Imagery
Immanuel Kant	harbor	Chicago, Illinois	Lake Michigan
Enlightenment