Carl Sandburg’s speaker talks to Bob with a sneer. He says lawyers are too buried in old law books and dead judges’ words, so tangled in ifs, buts, and whereases that they leave nothing behind worth having. The tone is darkly comic and bitter: a hearse horse snickers at a lawyer’s funeral, and people secretly sing when a lawyer dies. That grim joke drives the point home. The speaker contrasts lawyers with bricklayers, masons, plasterers, farmers, singers, and dreamers, whose work lasts or matters to the living. A lawyer, the speaker suggests, only feeds on dead men’s thoughts and leaves no real substance. The mood is wry, almost folksy in its sarcasm, and it asks Bob to see lawyers as hollow compared with people who build, grow, or create.
The Lawyers Know Too Much — Summary
The lawyers, Bob, know too much. They are chums of the books of old John Marshall. They know it all, what a dead hand wrote, A stiff dead hand and its knuckles crumbling, The bones of the fingers a thin white ash. The lawyers know a dead man's thoughts too well.
In the heels of the higgling lawyers, Bob, Too many slippery ifs and buts and howevers, Too much hereinbefore provided whereas, Too many doors to go in and out of.
When the lawyers are through What is there left, Bob? Can a mouse nibble at it And find enough to fasten a tooth in?
Why is there always a secret singing When a lawyer cashes in? Why does a hearse horse snicker Hauling a lawyer away?
The work of a bricklayer goes to the blue. The knack of a mason outlasts a moon. The hands of a plasterer hold a room together. The land of a farmer wishes him back again. Singers of songs and dreamers of plays Build a house no wind blows over. The lawyers — tell me why a hearse horse snickers hauling a lawyer's bones.