repeated out of
The windflower (anemone) blooms every spring from the same root system. Sandburg's making the flower a clock that measures geological time.
domes and stones
Domes = human architecture (cathedrals, capitols). Stones = foundations, monuments. Everything built to last forever.
last longer than
The paradox lands here: fragile annual flowers outlast marble and granite because they reproduce. Permanence through repetition, not mass.
Reading Notes
What Lasts
Sandburg wrote this around 1918, just after World War I leveled European cities and toppled empires. The domes that "fall to pieces" aren't abstract—he'd seen photographs of shelled cathedrals, ruined monuments. The poem asks: what actually survives?
The answer is strange. Not stone, not architecture, not anything humans build to announce permanence. Windflowers last because they're designed to disappear and return. The anemone dies back completely each year, survives as roots, blooms again. It lasts through repetition, not resistance.
Watch the grammar shift in the final stanza. Short declarative sentences pile up like rubble: "fall to pieces. / fall to pieces." Then the rhythm changes—longer lines, enjambment carrying across breaks. The wind keeps, the windflowers / keep. That repetition of "keep" across the line break enacts the very survival it describes. The poem's form demonstrates its argument.
Sandburg's Materials
Sandburg built his career on Chicago Poems (1916), celebrating industrial muscle, steel, railroads—the modern city's permanence. By 1918, that confidence was harder to hold. This poem inverts his usual materials. Instead of "Hog Butcher for the World," we get fragile petals.
The windflower (genus Anemone, from Greek "wind") blooms early spring in prairies and woodlands. Sandburg grew up in Galesburg, Illinois, would have seen them as a child. They're the first flowers after winter—"so fresh"—and they vanish quickly. The poem treats them as geological, not seasonal. "Out of old winds, out of / old times" stretches the flower's annual return into deep time.
"The wind young and strong" is the key phrase. Wind is both the destroyer (weathering stone) and the keeper (spreading seeds, pollinating). It's young because it renews itself, unlike monuments that age from the moment they're built. The flower survives by partnering with what destroys everything else.