Carl Sandburg wrote “Follies” during the late 1910s, a period when American poetry was shaking off stiff Victorian rhythms and reaching for a more direct, image-driven music. Sandburg, a journalist and poet from the Midwest, had already made his name with *Chicago Poems*; “Follies” appeared in his 1918 collection *Cornhuskers*, written as the First World War was ending and as modernist poets on both sides of the Atlantic were compressing large emotions into small, sharp scenes. The poem is barely a page, yet it moves like a slow camera through a garden.
The poem opens not with a statement but with an action already begun: “Shaken, / The blossoms of lilac, / And shattered, / The atoms of purple.” There is no speaker explaining who shook the blossoms or why they shattered. Instead, Sandburg lets the participles do the work, so the lilac seems to break apart in front of the reader. That word “atoms” is striking—a scientific, modern word placed inside a garden scene. It turns the purple flowers into tiny particles of color, as if beauty itself can be split into pieces. From there the poem shifts into a series of quiet observations: “Green dip the leaves. / Darker the bark. / Longer the shadows.” The inverted word order gives each line a hushed, ritual quality, and the three short sentences build a sense of time passing, light lowering, color deepening.
The middle of the poem opens outward. Poplars stand in “sheer lines” and “shimmer with masses of silver,” a phrase where the sibilant sounds mimic the trembling leaves. Then the gaze moves down into “a garden old with years / And broken walls of ruin and story.” Here the title “Follies” begins to resonate. A folly can be an ornamental garden building, a decorative ruin, or simply a foolish act. The garden has aged past its design; its walls are broken, yet they are full of “story.” The roses that rise there carry “red rain-memories,” a compressed image that fuses water, blood, color, and recollection. Ruin, the poem suggests, is not empty. It is where memory grows.
The final movement is the most personal. After the fragmented images, Sandburg turns outward with the exclamation “May!” and addresses someone directly: “In the open world / The sun comes and finds your face, / Remembering all.” The poem stops describing a landscape and becomes a meeting between sunlight and a face. The sun is not just warmth; it is an eye, a memory. May, the month of renewal, arrives not to erase the past but to recognize it. That final phrase “Remembering all” gathers the shattered atoms, the broken walls, and the rain-memories into a single moment of attention.
What makes “Follies” significant is the way it balances fragmentation and tenderness. Sandburg uses free verse with no regular rhyme scheme, yet the poem feels tightly made. Its music comes from repetition, alliteration, and the careful placement of short and long lines. The opening lines stutter and break; the closing sentence flows easily, as if the sun has gathered the scattered pieces. For student readers, the poem is a useful example of how a writer can make meaning through arrangement rather than explanation. It does not say “memory is like a garden.” It places broken walls, roses, rain, and sunlight next to each other and lets the reader feel the connection. In just a few lines, Sandburg turns a ruined garden into a place where the past is still alive, and where May’s light arrives as both a greeting and a remembrance.