Wars end, battlefields are covered in new grass, seasons change, time passes, and new life begins, but can we ever really heal from the wounds of war? Does the new grass that grows leave our memories unblemished? Carl Sanburg confronts an extensive amount of history of past wars in his poem Grass. He links them all together with the idea of the grass doing its job, which is growing over bodies left in battlefields. Within this context, Carl Sanburg and his poem Grass, demonstrate the use of proper nouns, verbs in the imperative tense, and interrogatories to emphasize his thoughts on war and the impact that nature has over human destruction through his words and the meanings behind them.
Carl Sanburg uses five proper nouns throughout this poem to help drive his point home, the point being that within the context of the poem, those nouns, which are names of famous, bloody battles, hold a strong weight to prove that people don’t care about change. By adding two of the five proper nouns in the very first line of the poem, it gives the reader and idea of the relevance of each proper nouns importance. Austerlitz, Waterloo, Gettysburg,…show more content… Throughout the poem, which is only eleven lines long, there are only two interrogatories. These interrogatories are important because it gives a different perspective, that perspective being from the humans instead of the grass. Within his poem, Sanburg states, “What place is this? Where are we now?” (8-9) to express not only the humans voice within the poem but their faults when it comes to sympathizing for the bodies that the grass has covered. By giving the reader a different perspective of what is going on, it examines people’s motives within themselves and how others can interpret it. By adding a different perspective into the poem, it allows opportunity for readers to open their mind to ideas they may have never