Carl Sandburg

Clark Street Bridge

Dust of the feet
And dust of the wheels,

Day shift inventory

The poem opens with industrial Chicago—wagons hauling goods, workers commuting. Clark Street Bridge was a major commercial artery in 1916.

Wagons and people going,
All day feet and wheels.
Now. . .
. . Only stars and mist
A lonely policeman,
Two cabaret dancers,

Night shift census

The lonely cop walks his beat while cabaret dancers head to work in Chicago's entertainment district. Different labor, same bridge.

Stars and mist again,
No more feet or wheels,
No more dust and wagons.
Voices of dollars
And drops of blood
. . . . .
Voices of broken hearts,

Singing three times

He repeats 'singing' and 'voices' obsessively in the final stanza—the sound matters more than what's being said. Listen to the rhythm.

. . Voices singing, singing,
. . Silver voices, singing,
Softer than the stars,
Softer than the mist.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Chicago's Double Exposure

Sandburg published this in Chicago Poems (1916), his breakthrough collection that made him famous for writing about industrial America. The Clark Street Bridge crossed the Chicago River in the heart of the city's commercial district—a chokepoint where workers, goods, and money all had to pass.

The poem works like a double-exposure photograph: same location, two different times superimposed. Day brings "dust"—the grit of commerce, the residue of labor. Night brings "mist"—something softer, more mysterious. The bridge doesn't change, but who crosses it does.

Notice what survives the transition: the policeman (working class, still on duty) and the cabaret dancers (working class, just starting their shift). The merchants and wagons vanish. Sandburg's populism shows in who gets to stay in the frame after dark.

The Money and Blood Economy

That strange middle stanza—"Voices of dollars / And drops of blood"—is doing two things at once. CONTEXT Chicago in 1916 was both boom town and slaughterhouse city. The stockyards processed millions of animals; the banks processed millions in commodities trading. Dollars and blood were the city's twin products.

But "voices of broken hearts" shifts the register from economic to emotional. Sandburg collapses the distance between commercial transaction and human cost. The cabaret dancers sing for money ("Silver voices"), but their songs carry heartbreak. The bridge hears both the cash register and the cry.

The final comparison—"Softer than the stars, / Softer than the mist"—makes human voices more delicate than the cosmos. It's an odd move for a tough-guy industrial poet. But Sandburg always insisted that working people contained multitudes: grit and tenderness, labor and song.