Carl Sandburg, the American poet and journalist, wrote “Choices” in the early twentieth century and published it in his 1916 collection *Chicago Poems*. Sandburg grew up amid the industrial Midwest, worked a series of manual jobs, and carried a deep sympathy for working people. His poetry often speaks from the street, the factory, and the railroad yard, and “Choices” is no exception. Written during an era of labor conflict, urban growth, and the First World War, the poem divides experience into two competing offers: one seductive and self-indulgent, the other harsh but honest.
The poem opens with a contrast in scale: “They offer you many things, / I a few.” What follows is a long, flowing sentence filled with nocturnal luxury—“moonlight on the play of fountains at night,” “bare-shouldered, smiling women and talk,” and a “cross-play of loves and adulteries.” Yet even these images carry an undercurrent of restlessness. The water sparkles with a “drowsy monotone,” suggesting beauty that numbs rather than awakens. And the final items in the offer—“a fear of death / and a remembering of regrets”—are not pleasures at all. The first offer, for all its shimmer, is a package of distraction and elegantly dressed unease. It points inward, toward self-absorption and melancholy.
Sandburg then reverses the rhythm entirely. The second stanza is abrupt and unadorned: “I come with: / salt and bread / a terrible job of work / and tireless war.” The colon halts the dreamy drift of the opening, and the language turns plain, even harsh. Salt and bread are not luxuries; they are elemental foods earned through labor. The “terrible job of work” is not softened by heroic adjectives. It is terrible, and it is necessary. “Tireless war” expands that idea, framing life as continuous struggle rather than escape. Then Sandburg makes the invitation direct: “Come and have now: / hunger. / danger / and hate.” The full stops after “hunger” and “danger” force a pause, letting each word land like a blow. This is not a comfortable offer, but it does not pretend to be anything else.
The poem’s construction embodies its argument. Sandburg uses free verse, with no regular rhyme or meter, shaping rhythm through syntax instead. The first stanza is one long, accumulating sentence, its repeated “and” creating a hypnotic, lulling motion. The second stanza breaks into fragments, imperatives, and hard stops. The music moves from seductive drift to staccato urgency. Key images collide deliberately: moonlight and fountains against salt and bread, smiling women against hunger, loves and adulteries against danger and hate. That collision is the central idea: real choice means recognizing the difference between comfort disguised as fullness and the stripped-down truth of struggle.
“Choices” remains significant because it refuses the easy pose of the poet as dreamer. Sandburg does not pretend that the second path is happy. He says it is real. In an age of sweatshops, strikes, and war, that reality demanded attention, not escape into a “drowsy monotone.” The poem’s lasting power is its honesty. It names the cost of staying awake to the world’s harsher truths and asks the reader to decide what is actually worth choosing.