Carl Sandburg’s “Population Drifts” grows out of the early twentieth century, when industrial cities were absorbing waves of European immigrants and rural migrants. Sandburg, the son of Swedish immigrants, published the poem in his 1916 collection *Chicago Poems*, after years of working as a laborer and journalist. He knew the tenement streets and box factories he wrote about, and he also knew the memory of older landscapes that immigrants carried. The poem follows one family from a rural past to an urban present: a woman formed by the “new-mown hay smell and wind of the plain,” her husband, and their six children, whose lives narrow into disease, jail, and factory work. The central idea is not simply that city life is hard, but that the land’s shaping power survives in the body and returns as a longing the next generation cannot identify.
Sandburg builds the poem in free verse, without regular rhyme or meter, so its movement feels more like speech or wind than like a fixed form. The opening line makes the landscape active: “New-mown hay smell and wind of the plain made her.” From the start, the woman is not just from a place; she is made by its smell and air. Her body carries that origin in “ribs [that] had the power of the hills,” in “tough” hands, and in “passion for life in her womb.” These words link strength, work, and desire to a natural world. Sandburg’s line breaks often leave small words like “in” hanging, which makes the reader feel the open, unfinished rhythm of drifting rather than the neat closure of rhyme.
The middle of the poem shifts from that open plain to the closed spaces of the city. The couple crosses the ocean and spends years “haggling with landlords / and grocers,” while their children “played on the stones / and prowled in the garbage cans.” The language turns bluntly physical: one child “coughed its lungs away,” two have adenoids and “can neither talk nor run like their mother,” one is in jail, and two work in a box factory. The phrase “like their mother” is especially painful because it measures how much vitality has been lost. These children are not villains or lazy; they are hemmed in by poverty, illness, and labor. As they fold “pasteboard,” the cheap material of boxes, their own lives seem folded into repeating, flattened shapes.
Yet Sandburg does not leave the poem in mere complaint. The box-factory workers feel “the wishing and the wistful glory in them that flutters / faintly” when spring glimmers or summer green turns brown. The words “wistful” and “flutters faintly” suggest an instinct that has been weakened but not extinguished. The poem’s turn comes after the colon: “They do not know it is the new-mown hay smell calling / and the wind of the plain praying for them to come / back and take hold of life again with tough hands / and with passion.” The smells and winds from the first stanza now act as verbs, “calling” and “praying.” The landscape has become a kind of ancestor, reaching toward the children who cannot recognize its voice.
That unrecognized call is what makes “Population Drifts” significant. Sandburg avoids easy sentimentality: the children cannot simply go back, and the poem never says they should. Instead, it portrays the inner drift of migration, the way a landscape can live inside people as a faint, unexplained ache. By returning to the exact images of hay and wind at the end, Sandburg gives the poem the shape of a prayer answered only in feeling. This combination of social observation and lyric longing made his *Chicago Poems* feel new in 1916, and it still gives immigrant and working-class experience a dignity beyond statistics.