Carl Sandburg gives us a compressed family story: a strong woman from open farmland crosses the ocean with her man, and the years in crowded urban poverty wear them down. One child dies of lung disease, two have adenoids, one is imprisoned, and two work in a box factory. Those two feel a faint, unexplained longing when spring and summer change the light. The speaker’s tone is sad but not sentimental. The mood mixes grief with a quiet, aching nostalgia. The two workers don’t realize that the “wistful glory” they feel is the memory of their mother’s old life calling them back — the smell of new-mown hay and the wind of the plain — offering strength, tough hands, and passion. The poem mourns what cities and poverty take from people and suggests that the land still reaches toward them.
Population Drifts — Summary
New-mown hay smell and wind of the plain made her a woman whose ribs had the power of the hills in them and her hands were tough for work and there was passion for life in her womb.
She and her man crossed the ocean and the years that marked their faces saw them haggling with landlords and grocers while six children played on the stones and prowled in the garbage cans.
One child coughed its lungs away, two more have adenoids and can neither talk nor run like their mother, one is in jail, two have jobs in a box factory
And as they fold the pasteboard, they wonder what the wishing is and the wistful glory in them that flutters faintly when the glimmer of spring comes on the air or the green of summer turns brown :
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.