Carl Sandburg spent his early career turning the rough music of American speech into poetry, and “Carlovingian Dreams” — collected in his 1920 volume *Smoke and Steel* — arrives with that voice already confident. Sandburg had already made his name with “Chicago” and its famous bold catalog of working life. Here he trades the stockyards for the medieval forest, but the voice remains the same: plain, playful, and unimpressed by crowns. Written in the years when modernism was shaking European and American verse, the poem looks backward not to grand empire but to ordinary appetites. Sandburg names Greeks, Romans, and the Carlovingians of Charlemagne’s line, yet he refuses to treat them as marble statues. They have picnics, wear “glad rags,” thumb their noses, and break eggs into frying pans. The poem insists that what lasts from any era is not only the conquest but the daily, bodily, rebellious life.
The central idea gathers around the command that opens and returns: “Count these reminiscences like money.” Memory, for Sandburg, is a kind of wealth, but it is not stored in vaults. It circulates through small details: a picnic, a piece of slang, a rude gesture, a fresh egg cracked over iron. The Greeks “had their picnics under another name,” which strips ancient ritual of its distance. The Romans wore party clothes and shrugged at the neighbors — “What of it?” — as if the whole empire could be heard in a teenager’s defiance. The Carlovingians haul logs and stick their thumbs to their noses, and even their dream of life tastes like “fresh eggs / broken over a frying pan” left by a violent uncle. History here is not a pageant of heroes; it is a family kitchen with blood on the walls and breakfast on the stove.
Sandburg builds that idea through free verse and repetition rather than fixed meter or rhyme. The poem moves in loose, breath-length lines, mixing long drifting phrases with short blunt questions. Repeated phrases such as “Count these reminiscences like money,” “Drift, and drift on, white ships,” and “sailing and changing and sailing” create an incantatory rhythm, as though the speaker is half-dreaming and half-counting coins. The effect is close to a work song or a blues refrain, where repeated lines carry the emotional weight. The white ships are the most elusive image in the poem — they sail through a “free sky blue,” unmoored from any real harbor, suggesting memory itself as a fleet of drifting cargo. That dreamy movement balances the earthy, almost comic images of copper pans, glad rags, spears, and short swords. The diction is deliberately plain and a little slangy: “glad rags” belongs to the dance floor, not to a history book, and “the great bad manners” turns insolence into a kind of inheritance.
What makes the poem significant is its democratic approach to the past. Sandburg was a poet of Chicago, of working people, of factory smoke and freight trains, and “Carlovingian Dreams” extends that sympathy backward across centuries. He finds the same swagger in ancient Romans and medieval Franks that he found on American street corners. The speaker ends by asking for “spring dreams” and wanting to count “picnics, glad rags and the great bad manners of / the Carlovingians breaking fresh eggs in the copper / pans of their proud uncles.” That closing catalogue mixes the seasonal and the domestic, the rude and the noble, until the past feels close enough to touch. Memory, Sandburg suggests, is not a monument to admire from a distance; it is loose change that can be counted, spent, and turned into new dreams.