Comparing Carl Sandburg's Grass And At The Un-National Border

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.” This quote by renowned Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana immaculately encapsulates the core message that is conveyed in both the poems “Grass” and “At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border.” The two poems employ disparate writing styles and divergent methods to describe the atrocities of war and violence, however both poems do ultimately condemn these inexcusable acts. Furthermore, beyond denouncing war, both poems greatly emphasize a part of war that is often neglected; how we choose to remember wars and how we must not allow ourselves to forget these brutal lessons of the past. Carl Sandburg and William E. Stafford both lived through numerous periods of violence, epochs where

“Grass” is written in a manner that could be construed as chaotic, with three stanzas each with a different number of lines. The first stanza is a tercet, the second a sestet, and the final stanza is a couplet. Furthermore, “Grass” does not follow a rhyme scheme and is therefore written in free verse. Conversely, “At the Un-National Monument…” follows a far more structured organizational system, with two cinquain stanzas, using ABCCB and ABACC rhyme schemes respectively. Despite their structural contrasts, the two poems share some mutual literary devices. For example, personification can be seen in both poems. In “Grass” the grass repeatedly exhibits human traits by commanding the bodies be shoveled under so that it may work. Similarly, in “At the Un-National Monument…”, the grass joins hands, and the sky is heroic, both implementations of personification. Additionally, both poems make use of allusion to describe their respective gory battles, requiring some knowledge in history to fully comprehend their meanings. In “Grass”, Sandburg alludes to the Napoleonic Wars by mentioning Austerlitz and Waterloo. He later mentions Gettysburg, Ypres, and Verdun. Gettysburg is alluding to the American Civil War, while the latter two refer to World War 1. In Stafford’s “At the Un-National Monument…”, he uses allusion to refer to the War of 1812, where the United States attempted to

In “Grass” Sandburg creatively describes the cyclic nature of human to forget past mistakes, and be doomed to repeat them. He does so by describing a scene in which bodies continuously pile up from wars in a chronological order, and each time the bodies pile up the grass “works” in order to cover them, effectively erasing them from our memories, and ensuring another pile of bodies to come. Stafford agrees with the sentiment that we are liable to make the same mistakes over and over if we forget our past, however Stafford relates this idea to monuments, as opposed to Sandburg who describes a lack thereof. “At the Un-National Monument” briefly mentions monuments in the same scope as the rest of the poem; representing them as non-existent in his unfortunately fictitious space of peace and harmony. Thanks to the context of the poem, it can be inferred that Stafford is acknowledging that monuments are a necessary evil, symbolizing suffering, loss of life, and humanity’s lowest points in the hopes that each monument will be the last one that must be erected. Regardless of how each poem expresses the idea that we must learn from our mistakes, both poems capture the fact that forgetting our mistakes is ingrained in human nature. Both poems eliminate the proof of our mistakes, whether by covering them with