Carl Sandburg sets up a rich man’s tomb in Graceland Cemetery, where his will pays twenty-five thousand dollars a year for upkeep and fresh flowers. The speaker’s tone is dry and cutting. That money buys lilacs, tulips, and roses so a dead man’s memory stays sweet, yet the next lines turn to living women who have almost nothing. Shop girls want nickels to go to the movies. Women in saloon back rooms drink or wait for men with loose silver. A salesgirl earning six dollars a week pulls on her stockings and no longer cares about God, newspapers, police, or the names people call her. The mood is bitter and ironic: a fortune goes to perfume around a corpse while working women scrape by on nickels and weekly wages. That contrast is the whole point.
Graceland — Summary
Tomb of a millionaire, A multi-millionaire, ladies and gentlemen, Place of the dead where they spend every year The usury of twenty-five thousand dollars For upkeep and flowers To keep fresh the memory of the dead. The merchant prince gone to dust Commanded in his written will Over the signed name of his last testament Twenty-five thousand dollars be set aside For roses, lilacs, hydrangeas, tulips. For perfume and color, sweetness of remembrance Around his last long home.
(A hundred cash girls want nickels to go to the movies to-night. In the back stalls of a hundred saloons, women are at tables Drinking with men or waiting for men jingling loose silver dollars in their pockets. In a hundred furnished rooms is a girl who sells silk or dress goods or leather stuff for six dollars a week wages And when she pulls on her stockings in the morning she is reckless about God and the newspapers and the police, the talk of her home town or the name people call her.)