Carl Sandburg’s lyric “Margaret” appeared in his 1916 collection *Chicago Poems*, a book that helped establish his reputation for tough city portraits and spare, imagistic lyrics. Written around the time his own daughter Margaret was young, it turns away from the factories, stockyards, and crowded streets of his Chicago poetry toward an intimate natural scene. Sandburg wrote in a deliberately plain American idiom, using free verse and direct sensory detail rather than formal rhyme or meter. This poem reads as a parent’s affectionate address as much as a nature sketch.
It begins with sound and motion: “Many birds and the beating of wings / Make a flinging reckless hum.” That phrase gives the morning air a careless, physical energy. The setting is “early morning at the rocks / Above the blue pool / Where the gray shadows swim lazy.” Sandburg gives one landscape two moods: above, the air is all wings and restless noise; below, shadows drift slowly across the water. The word “lazy” placed after “swim” draws out the line, slowing the rhythm so the second mood settles like shade over the first.
Then the speaker turns from the water to the child: “In your blue eyes, O reckless child, / I saw today many little wild wishes.” The echo of “blue” moves the pool’s color into the child’s gaze, and “reckless” returns from the first stanza, linking the girl’s spirit with the birds’ flinging energy. The wishes are called “little,” but they are also “wild” and “eager as the great morning.” That final comparison does the poem’s main work. The child may be small, her wishes unnamed and many, yet their eagerness belongs to the scale of dawn, not to the world of gray shadows.
The construction supports this meeting of outer and inner energy. The poem consists of two sentences: five lines for the landscape, three for the address to Margaret. No rhyme scheme holds them together. Instead, repeated *-ing* sounds in “beating,” “flinging,” and “swim” create a continuous hum, while the mirrored phrase “blue pool” and “blue eyes” acts as a hinge. The first sentence unrolls downward from sky to rocks to water; the second turns upward into the child’s face and outward into the morning. Sandburg does not explain the connection. He lets the repeated colors and the word “reckless” suggest that the child’s inner life is as natural and unrestrained as the birds.
What makes “Margaret” significant is its quiet confidence in small moments. Sandburg often wrote about working people, crowds, and city noise, but here he shows how free verse can be tender without becoming sentimental. The poem finds a child’s wild wishes inside a morning landscape and treats them as something large and promising. Its power comes from compression: two brief sentences, a few strong images, and one loving address hold together a vision of youth as eager as the day itself.