Carl Sandburg

Upstream

The strong men keep coming on.

shot, hanged, sick, broken

Four ways of being destroyed, escalating from violence to disease to total collapse. Notice the rhythm—each word gets one beat, like a drumbeat of casualties.

They go down shot, hanged, sick, broken.
They live on, fighting, singing,
lucky as plungers.

lucky as plungers

Plungers are gamblers who bet everything on a single chance. The 'luck' is surviving to fight another round, not winning—a dark kind of fortune.

The strong men . . . they keep coming on.
The strong mothers pulling them

dark sea, great prairie, long mountain

Three American landscapes—ocean (immigration), prairie (westward expansion), mountain (frontier hardship). The mothers are pulling children from geography itself.

from a dark sea, a great prairie,
a long mountain.
Call hallelujah, call amen,

Call hallelujah, call amen

Church language—hallelujah (praise), amen (affirmation). He's treating working-class survival as something sacred, worth religious celebration.

call deep thanks.
The strong men keep coming on.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Sandburg's Labor Hymn

This reads like a gospel song about the working class. Sandburg wrote it in 1916, during America's most violent labor conflicts—the Ludlow Massacre (1914) had just killed striking coal miners and their families, and the Haymarket affair was still in living memory. The poem's structure mirrors a call-and-response hymn: the repeated line "The strong men keep coming on" works like a congregation's refrain.

The genius is in what Sandburg *doesn't* say. He never explains who's shooting and hanging these men, or what they're fighting for. The violence is presented as inevitable weather—"they go down" uses the passive voice, as if being killed is just what happens to strong men. This isn't protest poetry demanding change; it's closer to a survival song, acknowledging that the casualties are endless but so are the replacements.

Notice the biological imagery in the second stanza. The "strong mothers" aren't giving birth in hospitals—they're "pulling" children from landscapes. The verb suggests extraction, like mining or harvesting. The "dark sea" likely references immigration (Sandburg's own parents were Swedish immigrants), while the "great prairie" and "long mountain" map the westward expansion that built industrial America. The mothers are literally producing the labor force from American geography.

What 'Strong' Means Here

Sandburg uses "strong" six times in eleven lines, but it doesn't mean powerful or victorious. These men go down "shot, hanged, sick, broken"—they're strong because they keep coming, not because they win. The strength is in replacement, in demographic inevitability. One generation gets destroyed, the mothers pull another from the landscape.

The poem's rhythm reinforces this. Read it aloud and you'll hear the relentless forward march: "The strong men keep coming on" is all stressed syllables, like footsteps that won't stop. When Sandburg adds the ellipsis in line 5—"The strong men . . . they keep coming on"—he creates a pause that feels like hesitation or exhaustion, but then the march resumes.

The final three lines shift to religious language: "hallelujah," "amen," "deep thanks." Sandburg is asking us to treat working-class endurance as sacred—not tragic, not heroic in the traditional sense, but worthy of the same reverence as a hymn. The "thanks" is ambiguous: gratitude for survival, or maybe just acknowledgment that the cycle continues, generation after generation, with no end in sight.