Classic Love Poems
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Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) was an American writer, editor, and poet. Much of his poetry focused on Chicago, Illinois where he spent time as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News. His poetry was composed primarily in free verse. He won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for the last of his six-volume biography on Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (1939), and another for a comprehensive collection of verse, Complete Poems (1951).
Chicago Poemsby Carl Sandburg
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning…. Read more
Carl Sandburg and wife, Lilian
(Portrait by Edward Steichen)
Under the Harvest Moon
Under the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over 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.
Two
Memory of you is . . . a blue spear of flower.
I cannot remember the name of it.
Alongside a bold dripping poppy is fire and silk.
And they cover you.
I Sang
I sang to you and the moon
But only the moon remembers.
I sang
O reckless free-hearted
free-throated rhythms,
Even the moon remembers them
And is kind to me.
Dream Girl
You will come one day in a waver of love,
Tender as dew, impetuous as rain,
The tan of the sun will be on your skin,
The purr of the breeze in your murmuring speech,
You will pose with a hill-flower grace.
You will come, with your slim, expressive arms,
A poise of the head no sculptor has caught
And nuances spoken with shoulder and neck,
Your face in a pass-and-repass of moods
As many as skies in delicate change
Of cloud and blue and flimmering sun.
Yet,
You may not come, O girl of a dream,
We may but pass as the world goes by
And take from a look of eyes into eyes,
A film of hope and a memoried day.
on “Sandburg, Carl”
