The speaker sets two ways of living side by side. One side offers beauty, pleasure, romance, and intrigue—moonlit fountains, smiling women, love affairs—but all of it comes tangled with fear of death and regret. The speaker refuses that package. What he brings instead is deliberately plain and demanding: salt and bread, hard work, endless struggle, hunger, danger, and hate. It is a kind of counter-offer, almost a challenge. He is not trying to comfort anyone; he is offering something raw, immediate, and unvarnished. The mood is grim, proud, and uncompromising. Sandburg makes the speaker sound like someone who distrusts easy beauty and chooses difficult truths over seductive illusions. The poem feels less like a rejection of life than a demand for a life stripped of luxury and self-deception.
Choices — Summary
They offer you many things, I a few. Moonlight on the play of fountains at night With water sparkling a drowsy monotone, Bare-shouldered, smiling women and talk And a cross-play of loves and adulteries And a fear of death and a remembering of regrets All this they offer you.
I come with: salt and bread a terrible job of work and tireless war; Come and have now: hunger. danger and hate.