Carl Sandburg

Passers-by

Passers-by,
Out of your many faces
Flash memories to me

day end

The speaker is remembering faces from earlier—this is retrospective observation, not real-time. The poem happens in memory, not on the street.

Now at the day end
Away from the sidewalks
Where your shoe soles traveled
And your voices rose and blent
To form the city's afternoon roar

city's afternoon roar

Sandburg's signature move: voices don't make noise, they make a 'roar'—the collective sound as a single industrial force.

Hindering an old silence

The city noise blocks out something ancient and pre-urban. Sandburg often positions modern industrial life against what it replaced.

Hindering an old silence.
Passers-by,
I remember lean ones among you,
Throats in the clutch of a hope,

Throats in the clutch

Hope physically grips the throat—Sandburg makes emotion anatomical. Notice 'clutch' suggests both grasping and choking.

Lips written over with strivings,
Mouths that kiss only for love,
Records of great wishes slept with,
Held long
And prayed and toiled for:
Yes,

Written on

The metaphor shifts: faces aren't just seen, they're read like text. Suffering and desire become legible inscriptions on the body.

Written on
Your mouths

Written on

The metaphor shifts: faces aren't just seen, they're read like text. Suffering and desire become legible inscriptions on the body.

And your throats
I read them
When you passed by.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Reading the Urban Body

Sandburg published this in Smoke and Steel (1920), his follow-up to the Chicago Poems that made him famous. By 1920, he'd spent years as a journalist walking Chicago streets, and this poem shows that training—the habit of reading faces for stories.

The key technical move happens at line 11: 'I remember lean ones among you.' Until then, the poem addresses a mass ('Passers-by,' 'your many faces'). But 'lean ones' starts sorting the crowd. Sandburg picks out specific types: people with hope choking their throats, people whose mouths show striving. The poem moves from crowd to individuals without ever naming anyone.

Notice what gets 'written' on bodies: 'strivings,' 'great wishes slept with, / Held long / And prayed and toiled for.' These aren't casual wants—these are the long-term hungers of working people. The phrase 'slept with' is intimate (sexual, even), but it means carrying wishes to bed every night for years. The poem makes desire visible on the body. Sandburg reads faces the way a doctor reads symptoms.

The last five lines break into short fragments—'Yes, / Written on / Your mouths'—like the speaker is still deciphering what he saw. The reading continues past the encounter. This is memory as ongoing interpretation, not snapshot.

The Old Silence

'Hindering an old silence' is the poem's strangest phrase. The city's roar doesn't break silence—it hinders it, blocks it, gets in its way. This suggests the silence still exists somewhere, just inaccessible.

Sandburg often positioned the industrial city as both vital and destructive. In 'Chicago' (1914), he celebrated the 'City of the Big Shoulders' while acknowledging it was 'wicked' and 'crooked.' Here, the roar of voices (collective urban energy) actively prevents access to something older and perhaps more essential. The silence isn't just absence of noise—it's 'old,' meaning pre-urban, maybe pre-industrial.

This matters for how we read the ending. When Sandburg reads 'great wishes' on people's throats, he's reading what the city creates—ambition, striving, hope that clutches and chokes. But the 'old silence' suggests something the city has covered over. The poem doesn't say whether that's loss or progress. It just notes the hinder—the blockage, the thing that can't be reached anymore.