NET Festival; 32; Carl Sandburg Remembered

Maybe. Look out how you use proud words. When you let proud words go, it is not easy to call them back. They were long boots hard, boots they walk off proud. They can't hear you calling, look out how you use proud words. Words were the life work of Carl Sandberg. During his 89 years, he must have put millions of them down on paper. And those words made him a famous man. But once when he was asked how he would like to be remembered, he answered, I'd rather be known as a man who says what I need mainly is three things in life, possibly four, to be out of jail, to eat regular, and to get what I write printed,

and then a little love at home and a little outside. I'm James Broderick and I would like to talk about this man in his words. To listen to his voice, reading some of them, to read some others myself, to hear how he was remembered by several of his friends, and to see him as he was recorded through the eyes of a camera. 57 days after his death, the group of his friends and relatives gathered at the foot of this monument to remember him. And what a group it was, young people who were studying his work, his wife, relatives, friends who were also famous writers, friends who were not. People who would never met him, members of the federal government, and the president of the United States. They came here to the Lincoln Memorial to remember not a politician or a statesman, a general or a conventional hero, but a poet,

who was also an essayist, a critic, a biographer, and a historian. Carl Sandberg, who had died on July 22, 1967. And here on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial was the fitting place for this event. Ray Ram Lincoln is best known to many Americans through Sandberg's massive sixth volume biography. In one of these volumes, Sandberg wrote of Lincoln, he was a dreamer, and a man of reverie is all poets are. While at the same time he had the practicality of an Edison, a combination you don't often find. Besides, he was endowed with a new testament patience and an old testament stubbornness. To a remarkable extent, Carl Sandberg was also describing himself. At this ceremony, three men paid tribute to Sandberg. A fellow poet, Archibald McLeish, a poet and literary critic, Mark Vandorn, and the president of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson.

This was the public tribute made formally by public figures in a public place, but the most fitting tribute to Carl Sandberg is the private one. Paid whenever his words are listened to or read. Now this program combines these two. His words were possible as he recorded them and the public ceremony of autumn, 1967. It was opened by Secretary of Interior Stuart Udall. This is the appointed hour for the National Memorial Service for the late Carl Sandberg. The program will proceed as it is printed. Would you rise, please, for the invocation by Dean Francis Sayer? Oh, God, maker of sea and land of sky and air, thou who doth not lock away thy love, nor keep it head? With what rejoicing do we thank thee for the homely spirit of our brother, Carl,

who gave words to the whisper of our hearts and music to the yearning of our souls? As he quested thy love in every cherished by-path of mankind, so may we ever seek thy grace. As a mid-storm and dream, he breathed his deep silent prayers, so may the shadow of his keening life lie reverently upon the people and the land he revered. So, O Lord, do thou open the doors of mourning? Throw not away the keys of night that he who loved so well here on earth, may ever dwell in the splendour of thy glory, amen. Mr. President, Mr. Chief Justice, Mrs. Sandberg.

Eight weeks ago, I wrote a poem which asked itself a question, where a poet's from. Where he's born, settles, where the papers claim him. Carl Sandberg, born in Illinois, died in flat rock, Carolina, in Chicago, famous. Archibald McLeish, the poet and dramatist, was a lifelong friend of Carl Sandberg. The greatest tribute one poet can pay to another is to write a poem on the occasion of his death. Carl Sandberg, born in Illinois, died in flat rock, Carolina, in Chicago, famous. Where was Sandberg from? Chicago. People knew where Frost was from in spite of San Francisco from New England, what town or what proud county knew that other coming.

He lived around. He lived in Kansas, Chicago on the old west side, Michigan, Nebraska, in Wisconsin. Where was Carl from in the Carolinas when he died? His tongue might tell. He talked peolvia, always in over low the way the railroad trainman in Illinois called it out in cool reverberating stations. His sound might say, he said, Mizzur, a stumbled em in an S and an O long as a night freight off across the prairie, asking the moon for answers and the sound goes through and through. Where was Sandberg from, old poet, dead in Carolina, in his great repute? Peoria, he said, Mizzur, the neglected names that now, because his mouth has uttered them are beautiful.

Archibald McLeish wrote a poem about the many places Carl Sandberg was from. Carl Sandberg wrote a poem about one of them. It is called Prairie. I was born on the prairie and the milk of its wheat, the red of its clover, the eyes of its women gave me a song and a slogan. Here the water went down, the iceberg slid with gravel, the gaps in the valleys hissed and the black loam came and the yellow sandy loam. Here between the sheds of the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians, here now a morning star fixes a fire sign over the timber claims and cow pastures, the corn belt, the cotton belt, the cattle ranches. Here the grey geese go 500 miles and back with a wind under their wings, honking the cry for a new home. Here I know I will hanker after nothing so much as one more sunrise

or a sky moon of fire, double to a river moon of water. The prairie sings to me in the forenoon, and I know in the night I rest easy in the prairie arms on the prairie heart. After the sunburn of the day, handling a pitchfork at a hay rack, after the eggs and biscuits and coffee, the pearl-grey haystacks in the gloaming are cool prayers to the harvest hands. In the city among the walls, the overland passenger train is choked and the pistons hiss and the wheels curse. On the prairie, the overland flits on phantom wheels and the sky and the soil beneath them muffled the pistons and cheer the wheels. Oh prairie mother, I am one of your boys. I have loved the prairie as a man with a heart-shotful of pain over love. Here I know I will hanker after nothing so much as one more sunrise

or a sky moon of fire, double to a river moon of water. I am a brother of the corn huskers who say its sundown tomorrow is a day. It has been said that Sandberg's poetry should be read with a Midwestern accent. Perhaps what should have been said is that his poetry can best be read by himself. For only Sandberg has the lilt, the sing-song quality, a heritage from his Swedish ancestry that can evoke his memory of the American country that he was from. Here prairie waters by night. Chatter of birds, two by two raises a night's song, joining a litany of running water. Sheer waters showing the rest of the whole stones remembering many rains. And the long willows, droughts on the shoulders of the running water

and sleep from much music. Join songs of day end, feathery throats and stony waters in a choir chanting new songs. It is too much for the long willows when low laughter of a red moon comes down. And the willows, droughts and sleep on the shoulders of the running water. But there's far more to say of Carl Sandberg than where he was from. There's the question also of where he was going, where he went. Back in the 1930s, he published some lines in which he recorded the convictions of a Chicago poet. One of the early Chicago poets, one of the slouching, under slung Chicago poets having only the savvy god gave him, lacking a gap, lacking brass knuckles,

having one lead pencil to spare, wrote. I am credulous about the destiny of man. And I believe more than I can ever prove of the future of the human race and the importance of illusions. No one knew Sandberg would identify this as a self-portrait. Sandberg, though he sometimes slouched, was never under slung. There are, however, lightnesses, traits and associations in common. There was Chicago, even one might say here early Chicago. There was that one lead pencil to spare. And there was, more obviously, the talk. There is the poem Chicago. That describes the city of Sandberg, so it's bare, with its energy showing.

Hard butcher for the world, toolmaker, stacker of wheat, player with railroads and the nation's freight handler, stormy, husky, brawling, city of big shoulders. They tell me you are wicked, and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps, luring the farmboys, and they tell me you are crooked, and I answer yes, it is true. I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again. And they tell me you are brutal, and my reply is, on the faces of women and children, I have seen the marks of wanton hunger. And having answered so, I turn once more to those who sneer at this, my city, and I give them back the sneer, and say to them, come and show me another city, with lifted head singing so proud to be alive, and coarse, and strong, and cunning.

Blinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job. Here is a tall, bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities. Fears is a dog with tongue, lapping for action. Cunning is a savage, pitted against the wilderness. Bearheaded, shoveling, wrecking, planning, building, breaking, rebuilding. Under the smoke dust all over his mouth, lapping with white teeth. Under the terrible burden of destiny, lapping as a young man laughs. Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs, who has never lost a battle. Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people. Laughing, lapping the stormy husky, brawling laughter of youth, half naked sweating, proud to be hog butcher, toolmaker, stacker of wheat, player with railroads and freight handler to the nation.

Chicago was the first poem of Sandberg to receive instant recognition. Americans identified with the energy and raw vigor which Sandberg saw and recorded. The Chicago described in Sandberg's poetry was a city of people, a city overflowing with every race, creed, color, and profession. Some have names, Jim Kirsch, Gabrielle Giovanniti, the Rosenheims, Mag or Jack. But more often Sandberg described them without names. The fish cryer who dangled herrings before prospective customers, evinsing a joy identical with that of Pavlova dancing. The shovel man keeping the road beds so that the roses and junk will shake hardly at all and the cut-class faces standing slender on the tables in the dining cars. Or Chick Laura with her hair blowing careless, who everybody loved,

but nobody knew where she went. Whether they had names or not was of no importance, for they were the people of the city. They gave the city its soul. Now if the heart of a city grew from its people, it showed itself in those great buildings reaching for the sky. A Sandberg described this urban geography in his poem, Skyscraper. By day the Skyscraper looms in the smoke in the sun and has a soul. Prairie and valley, streets of the city pour people into it, and they mingle among its twenty floors and are poured out again back to the streets, prairies and valleys. It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and out all day that give the building a soul of dreams and thoughts and memories. Dumped in the sea or fixed in a desert who would care for the building or speak its name or ask a policeman the way to it.

Elevators slide on their cables and tubes, catch letters and parcels, and iron pipes carry gas and water in and sewage out. Wires, climb with secrets, carry light and carry words and tell terrors and profits and loves. Curses of men grappling plans of business and questions of women in plots of love. Hour by hour the sun and the rain, the air and the rust and the press of time running into centuries play on the building inside and out and use it. Men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar are laid in graves where the wind whistles a wild song without words. And so are men who strung the wires and fixed the pipes and tubes and those who saw it rise flow by floor. Soles of them all are here, even the hard carry of begging it back doors hundreds of miles away, and the bricklayer who went to state's prison for shooting another man while drunk.

One man fell from a girder and broke his neck at the end of a straight plunge. He is here. His soul has gone into the stones of the building. Toward the end of the afternoon all works slackens and all jobs go slower as the people feel day closing in on them. One by one the floors are emptied. The uniformed elevator men are gone, pales, clang. Scrubbers work, talking in foreign tongues, broom and water and mop clean from the floors, human dust and spit and machine grime of the day. A young watchman leans at a window and sees the lights of barges budding their way across a harbor, nets of red and white lanterns in a railroad yard, and a span of glooms flashed with lines of white and blurs of crosses and clusters over the sleeping city. By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul.

Carl Stamberg aptly described himself, there are poets of the cloister and the quiet corner of green fields and the earth serene and its changes. There are poets of streets and struggles, of dust and combat, of violence, want to know justified, of plain folk living close to hard earth. There have been poets whose themes move through both of the foregoing approaches. It is so with Stamberg, for throughout his poems of cities and country is a continuous thread. Stamberg believed passionately in the future of the human race, and it is this credence in the destiny of man that Archibald McLeish recognized. Stamberg, too, was credulous about the destiny of man and believed more than he could ever prove the future of the human race.

Indeed, it was precisely because he so believed and was thus credulous that he became the poet whose death has brought us here this afternoon, here not only to Washington, but to this particular place in Washington. For this particular place is also committed to an unprovable and as yet unproved belief in the future of the human race, a credulity about the destiny of man. Poets are not comparable. They are not, as the lawyers say, fungible, interchangeable like grains of wheat. You cannot measure one against another saying this one is larger or more durable than that one, greater as the textbooks say. What foot rule will measure the comparative dimensions of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, of Sappho and Sophocles of Dante and Dunn?

Poets, when they are poets, are as unique as poems are when they are actually poems, which is to say incomparably unique, essentially themselves. But although poets can't be compared, they can be distinguished, and one of the most elementary distinctions is that between the poet, however, great whose achievement is in a particular poem or poems, and the poet, however, incomparable whose achievement is in the work as a whole, the body of the work, all sorts and kinds and degrees bound up together. Frost spoke unforgotterly for the first, when he said it at dinner in Amherst on his 80th birthday, that he hoped to leave behind a few poems that would be hard to get rid of, which, of course, he did, and more than a few, and far more than hard to get rid of, though perhaps nothing is really more than that. Sandberg might stand in our own time, at least, for the second.

With Sandberg, it is the body of the work that weighs, the sum of it, a whole, quite literally, greater than the total of its parts. And what creates that whole, what binds the parts together, is, of course, precisely the credulity confessed by that slouching, under slung Chicago poet. Sandberg had a subject, and the subject was belief in man. You find it everywhere. You find it announced in the title of the book, in which that Chicago poet appears, the people, yes. You find it in one form or another through the hundred odd poems and prozes of which that extraordinary book is composed. You find it in other poems, and in other books. Most important of all, you find it in the echo which all these poems and books leave in the ear, your ear, and the ears of others. The echo which has made the body of Sandberg's work a touchstone for generations of readers, almost by this time for three generations, a touchstone of what?

A touchstone of America. If ever a man wrote for a particular people, however he may have reached in his heart for all people who was Sandberg, between Amarilla and the North Pole is only a barbed wire fence out here. The only windbreak is the North Star. And if ever a man was heard by those he wrote for it was Carl. Europeans, even the nearest in that direction, the English, don't truly understand him, but Americans do. There is a raciness in the writing and the old strict sense of the word raciness, a liveliness, a pungency which is native and natural in the American ear. The people, yes, they have their proverbs, ancient and modern. Whether the stone bumps the jug or the jug bumps the stone, it's bad for the jug. Better leave the child's nose dirty than to ring it off.

We all belong to the same big family and have the same smell. Handling honey, tar, or done, some of it sticks to the fingers. He who burns himself must sit on the blisters. To work hard, to live hard, to die hard, and then go to hell after all would be too damned hard. Isn't that an iceberg on the horizon, Captain? Yes, Madam. What if we get in a collision with it? The iceberg, Madam, will move right along as though nothing had happened. Tanberg was an American.

He was an American also of our time, of our generation. He died 57 days ago. He was seen and known and talked to by many in this meeting. He struggled with the struggles of the generation to which most of us belong. The struggles of the Great Depression and the many wars and the gathering, racial crisis and all the rest. He was a man of our time who lived in our time, laughed at the jokes our time, as laughed at shed his tears. And he was credulous. He was a credulous man, a man credulous about humanity, a man who believed more than he could prove about humanity. And Tanberg, though he listened to those who thought themselves realists, though he was attentive to the hard headed, was not convinced by them. Tanberg himself answered why he was not convinced. In discussing his novel, Remembrance Rock, he said there never has been a time there never has been a time there were not clouds in the horizon for this country.

And there was one crisis after another that can be named in colonial times and the American Revolution and the Civil War, the like of which almost no other country has ever had. And then the two world wars. Over and over again it has looked as though we were sunk as a nation. And always it's the point I try to make in that novel Remembrance Rock always. There has been a saving remnant always. There has been enough of a small faithful minority faithful to the death. Now who is that faithful minority? Archibald McLeish went on to say in the people, yes, it has said the strong lose against the stronger. And across the bitter years and the howling winters, the deathless dream will be the stronger. She'll man always go on, doggy dog, who says so? The stronger. And who is the stronger?

From every page of the people, yes, and from the very title, we hear Sandberg's answer. The people will live on. The learning and blundering people will live on. They will be tricked and sold and again sold and go back to the nourishing earth for root holes. The people so peculiar and renewal and come back. You can't laugh off their capacity to take it. The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas. The steel mill sky is alive. The fire breaks white and zigzag. Shot on a gunmetal gloaming. Man is a long time coming. Man will yet win. Brother may yet line up with brother. This old Anneville laughs at many broken hammers. There are men who cannot be bought.

The fire borner at home in fire. The stars make no noise. You can't hinder the wind from blowing. Time is a great teacher. Who can live without hope? In the darkness with a great bundle of grief the people march. In the night an overhead of shovel of stars for keeps the people march. Where to? What next? What Sandberg knew and said was what America knew from the beginning and said from the beginning and as not yet, no matter what is believed about her forgotten how to say. That those who were credulous about the destiny of man who believed more than they can prove with the future of the human race will make that future shape that destiny. This was his great achievement that he found a new way in an incredulous and disbelieving and often cynical time

to say what Americans have always known. And beyond that there was another and even greater achievement that the people listened. They are listening still. The people listened to Sandberg but he also listened to the people. He listened to their words and their songs. All through his roaming as a youth riding the freight he jotted down the songs he heard using his own system of musical shorthand. And as he went around the country giving lectures new folk songs continued to roll in on him. Out of this came the American song bag. A book of over 300 selections. It includes hillbilly laments, farm hands ballads, cowboy songs, a cross section of the traditional music of America. And a character who appear in these songs are real.

Real is life, only more lyric than life ever quite gets to be. For Sandberg was the last of the great troubadores, both his singing and his search for songs are part of his belief in the essential marriage of man. This song entitled Bird in a Cage. Bird in a cage, love bird in a cage. Waiting for Willie to come back to me. Roses are red and love violence are blue. Go for it in hand, Rose I love you. Write me a letter, write it to me. Stand for tomorrow, send it away. Write me a letter, send it by mail.

Send and direct it to Lexington. In the cage, love bird in a cage. Waiting for Willie to come back to me. In 1907, Sandberg met the Steikens, the photographer Edward and his sister, Lillian. Paula was the name Sandberg gave Lillian, and within a year they were married. This union gave Sandberg the ideal lifetime partner in Paula, and a lifetime friend in Edward. For in the early years, a Sandberg was writing Paula, sent his work to publishers, and shared in his struggle for recognition.

Edward and Cykin and Sandberg shared each other's dreams and aspirations. Sandberg's early recognition of Steikens' genius resulted in the first biography of a photographer, Steikens, the photographer. Collaborative works followed such as the World War II exhibition, Road to Victory, with pictures by Steikens and text by Sandberg. These exhibits have long since been dismantled, yet they are still remains a permanent record of their relationship. It lives in the hundreds of portraits of Carl Sandberg by Steikens. They provide the clearest image of Sandberg, the family man, of the man who could write the poem for his wife. Call simply Paula. Nothing else in this song, only your face. Nothing else here. Only your drinking night gray eyes. The peer runs into the lake straight as a rifle barrel.

I stand on the pier and sing how I know you mornings. It is not your eyes, your face, I remember. It is not your dancing, racehorse feet. It is something else I remember you for on the peer mornings. Your hands are sweeter than nut-brown bread when you touch me. Your shoulder brushes my arm. A southwest wind crosses the pier. I forget your hands and your shoulder and I say again, nothing else in this song, only your face. Nothing else here. Only your drinking night gray eyes. Sandberg wrote many poems about Paula, love poems. This one is called Explanations of Love. There is a place where love begins and a place where love ends.

There is a touch of two hands that foils all dictionaries. There is a look of eyes fierce as a big Bethlehem open-heart furnace or a little green fire as subtle and torch. There are single careless bywords. Portentus as a big bend in the Mississippi River. Hands, eyes, bywords. Out of these, love makes battlegrounds and workshops. There is a pair of shoes, lovewares. And the coming is a mystery. There is a warning love sends and the cost of it is never written till long afterward. There are explanations of love in all languages

that one found wiser than this. There is a place where love begins and a place where love ends and love asks nothing. Another friend of Carl Sandberg's Mark Van Doren, the poet, critic historian, also spoke at the September 1967 memorial. Mr. President, Mr. Chief Justice, Mr. Sandberg, distinguished guests, friends of Carl Sandberg. We have assembled here to honor a poet recently dead, who devoted the best decades of his long life to honoring another poet whose image towers above us at this moment. Abraham Lincoln was a great poet whose genius happened to express itself in prose. And Carl Sandberg, though his genius expressed itself in both prose and verse,

may never have achieved more lasting poem than the one we find in the six large volumes of his Abraham Lincoln, the prairie years and the war years. Whether or not this is true, only time, of course, will tell. Meanwhile, however, let us look at the memorial in words, which Carl Sandberg added to the memorial in marble before which we are gathered. On February 12, 1959, Carl Sandberg celebrated the 150th birthday of Lincoln with an address to the Congress of the United States, which began with these already famous words. Not often in the story of mankind, there's a man arrive on earth who is both steel and velvet, who is as hard as rock and soft as drifting fog, who holds in his heart and mind the paradox of terrible storm and peace unspeakable and perfect.

The address went on to assert that if ever such a man arrived on earth, his name was Abraham Lincoln, and the whole of Sandberg's biography documents the assertion. This was not an easy thing to do, nor could it have been done briefly. It could not have been done without canvassing in Sephora such a thing as possible. All of the impressions made by Lincoln upon those who lived with him in his time. All of the memories of him, they sat down. All of the opinions from high to low that people had of him. All of the legends verifiable or not that grew like grass, like flowers, like weeds, like trees around the mystery that he was. For he was never fully understood.

Just as he was never seen with simple clarity by those for whom his figure, his face, and his infinitely subtle mind were always changing. Sandberg spent the better part of 30 years writing his masterpiece on Abraham Lincoln. In 1940, he received the Pulitzer Prize for it. Asked once why he had spent so much time with Lincoln, he replied, well, a straight-off, simplest answer to that is because he was such good company. Here perhaps is the clue to the greatness of the work. For beneath the massive research and documentation there exists Sandberg's obvious love and respect for Lincoln. Like one friend writing about another, whether it be the sorrow and he deals with the assassination, or the loving care for detail with which he describes Lincoln in this section from the prairie years. Lincoln was 51 years old. With each year since he had become a grown man, his name and ways and stories about him

had been spreading among plain people and their children. So tall, so bony, was so peculiar, a slouch and so easy, a saunter, so sad and so haunted-looking, so quizzical and comic. As if hiding a lantern that lighted and went out and that he lighted again, he was the strange friend and the friendly stranger. Like something out of a picture book for children, he was. His form of slumping arches and his face of Gaunt's sockets were a shape a great artist had scrawled from careless clay. He looked like an original plan for an extra long horse, or a lean tawny buffalo, that a changer had suddenly whisked into a man's shape. There could have been times when children and dreamers looked at Abraham Lincoln and lazily drew their eyelids half shut and let their hearts roam about him. And they half believed him to be a tall horse chestnut tree,

or a rangy horse, or a big wagon, or a log barn full of new moon hay. Something else or more than a man, a lawyer, a Republican candidate with principles, a prominent citizen, something spreading, elusive, mysterious, the strange friend, and the friendly stranger. To write the biography of such a man might seem impossible, but it was possible for Carl Sandberg because he knew a certain secret that no other biographer has known. Or if he did not know it as most men know things, he possessed it by virtue of his own unique nature, so that he did not have to think of it as something outside himself. He knew from the ground up the man in Lincoln who was both serious and humorous.

The man indeed whose seriousness was best certified by the humor he kept ever in reserve. His humor, mysteriously enough, was itself a serious thing. It was the final evidence of his wisdom. We could not take him as seriously as we do, and as Carl Sandberg undoubtedly did, were it not for the way his mind worked and played at the same identical moment. And this can be thoroughly comprehended only by those lucky persons who have the same double gift within themselves. Carl Sandberg, whose seriousness, nobody has ever impeached, and his view of Lincoln took in all of the agony, the brooding he was called upon to endure. Nevertheless, took in as well, the man who said once in Illinois,

a woman is the only thing I'm afraid of that I know can't hurt me. The Sandberg who quoted this, probably was no expression on his poker face, was the Sandberg who explained in 1954, when he was publishing the one-volume edition of his Lincoln, why it had been necessary to abridge the longer work. At various times, I met persons who had had time to read the six volumes, though not the price to buy them. So they read public library volumes, one by one. One man had started with volume three of the war years, then volume two, after which he was able to get volumes one and two of the prairie years. Finishing the sixth volume set, with volume four and then volume one of the war years, the only comment I could make was,

what a way to run a railroad. Other biographers have talked about Lincoln's humor, but Carl Sandberg had it, quick and light between the terrible dark moments that he had also to be told, and Sandberg told them, so that his memorial in words, weeps quite as often as it smiled, but it smiles as often as it weeps, so that we have in the end a rich, deep, resonant story convincing for us because we are more than will or near its subject. We are in it. We live as Lincoln lived, and it will never be possible to forget the experience. The steel and the velvet, the heartbreak and the humor, all are one, as Shirley was intended. Also around Lincoln gathered some of the hope that a democracy can choose him, and set him up high with power and honor, and the very act does something to the man himself.

Raises up new gifts, modulations, controls, outlooks, wisdoms, inside the man, so that he is something else again, than he was before they sifted him out, and anointed him to take an oath, and solemnly sign himself for the heart and terrible, eye-filling and center-stage role of head of the nation. To be alive for the work he must carry in his breast, Cape Cod, the Shenandoah, the Mississippi, the Gulf, the Rocky Mountains, the Sacramento, the Great Plains, the Great Lakes, their dialects and shibbolits. He must be in the stink with the regions of corn, textal mills, cotton, tobacco, gold, coal, zinc, iron. He would be written as a father of his people if his record ran well, one whose heart beat with understanding of the many who came to the executive mansion.

In no one of the 31 rooms of the White House was Lincoln at home. Back and forth in this house trod phantoms, red platoons of boys vanished into the war. Thin white spoken ghosts of women who would never again hold those boys in their arms. They made a soft moaning the imagination could hear in the dark night and the grey dawn. To think incessantly of blood and steel, steel and blood, the argument without end by the mouths of brass cannon, a mystic cause carried aloft and sung on dripping and crimson bayonet points. To think so and thus across nights and months, folding up into years, was a wearing and a grinding that brought questions.

What is this teaching and who learns from it? And where does it lead? There was that opening sentence of the house divided speech. If we could first know where we are and whether we are attending, we could better judge what to do and how to do it. The dew came under White House lawn and the moonlight spread lace of white films in the night. And the syringa and the bridal wreath, blossom and the birds fluttered in the bushes and nested in the sycamore and the viry thresh fluted with never-awiriness. The wardrobe's roll and the telegraph clicked off mortality lists. Now a thousand, now ten thousand in a day. Yet there were moments when the processes of men

seemed to be only an evil dream. And justice lay in deeper transitions than those wrought by men dedicated to kill or be killed. Beyond the black smoke lay what salvations and jubilies. Death was in the air, so was birth. What was dying, no man was knowing. What was being born, no man could say. Carl Sandberg once wrote a poem and titled it Finish. It reads, Death comes once, let it be easy. Ring one bell for me once, let it go at that. Or ring no bell at all, better yet. Sing one song if I die. Sing John Brown's body or shout all over God's heaven.

Or sing nothing at all, better yet. Death comes once, let it be easy. Oh oh oh, oh oh, oh oh, oh oh, oh, oh. I got a roll, you got a roll, all gots to look at a roll. We're gonna go get to heaven, then for the whole world. Don't shout, I hope that you're there. Baby, do you know that we're both talking forever and forever? Oh, oh, oh, oh, don't shout, I hope that you're there. I can't go home, you've all gone.

Oh, oh, oh, guys, chillin down. Come, we'll get to heaven, the crystalline zone in the swamp again. We'll all reach heaven, heaven. And we'll get to heaven, I've got a song, you've got a song, all God's German got a song. I've got a song, you've got a song, you've got a song. I've got a song, you've got a song. The President of the United States,

Lyndon Baines Johnson. Secretary Udall, Miss Sandberg. I love Chief Justice and Mrs. Warren. Members of the United States Senate. Dean Sair, Mr. Vandoren, Mr. McLeaf. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. I am both honored and saddened by the opportunity to join today with Carl Sandberg's friends in celebrating that vital, exuberant, wise and generous man. This is the right place for thinking about Carl Sandberg to him and to me. Abraham Lincoln was the embodiment of our national aspirations. The nearest that any man has come to summing up the American experience in himself.

Sandberg loved to come here to what he once called the Fogg-Swip Lincoln Memorial, white as a blonde woman's arm. I have no pretensions as a literary critic, but I think Carl Sandberg belongs in a very special category among poets along with Walt Whitman. And Whitman wrote, the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. Here at last is something in the Doings of Man that corresponds with the broadest doings of the day and night. And like Whitman, Sandberg seemed to have his finger always on the American post.

He seemed to be able to give voice to the whole range of America's hopes and America's hates. He seemed able to communicate above all the restless energy that has vitalized and stimulated on occasion, that graded the history of our nation. Well, Carl Sandberg is gone. He is part of the Earth that he celebrated in Illinois and Kentucky and North Carolina. He's part of the American Earth. What will live on forever, though, is his faith, his faith in the individual human beings,

whom we impersonally call Americans. He knew that always in America the strong men keep coming on. So let us respect his wishes and ring no bell at all to mourn his death. But surely we must, as he asks us, sing one song in memory of this strong singer of ours. I will miss him. We will all miss him. There will not be one like him again. So Carl Sandberg was remembered on September 17th, 1967.

He is remembered for what he wrote and what he felt. But once he tried to explain that perhaps what his most deeply felt cannot be spelled out, perhaps it is for this belief, belief in the inexplicable, that he will also be remembered. If poems could be explained, then poets would have to leave out roses, sunsets, faces from their poems. Yet it seems that for thousands of years, poets have been writing about roses, sunsets, faces, because they have mystery, significance, and they have their light beauty, an appeal, a lesson, and a symbolism that stays with us long as we live. It was something like this in the heart of the philosopher who declared what can be explained is not poetry.

What can be explained is not poetry. The buffaloes are gone and those who saw the buffaloes are gone. Those who saw the buffaloes by thousands and how they poured the prairie sod into dust with their hoofs, their great heads down, pawing on in a great pageant of dusk. Those who saw the buffaloes are gone and the buffaloes are gone. The buffaloes are gone and those who saw the buffaloes by thousands and how they poured the prairie sod into dust with their hoofs. The buffaloes are gone and those who saw the buffaloes by thousands and how they read and love alice are blue, go hard in hell, lose I love you.

Write me a letter, write it today, stamp it tomorrow, send it away. Write me a letter, send it by mail, send and direct it to Lexington Hill. In a cage, love, birdie in a cage, waiting for willy to come back to me. This is NET, the National Educational Television Network.

The National Educational Television Network. The National Educational Television Network.