Carl Sandburg’s speaker looks at a scene artists have long loved: women washing their hair outdoors, with plaits, strands, and combs catching the light. The poem insists that this beauty depends on ordinary natural forces. Sun has dried and warmed the women’s heads as they bend and shake out their hair. Rain has kept that hair alive. If rain disappeared for a year, the colors—copper, dusk, chestnut—would wither too. The speaker’s tone is tender and grateful, almost reverent, but grounded in plain things: buffalo horn combs, shoulders, weather. The mood is warm and luminous, with a quiet reminder underneath: human loveliness is part of a larger cycle. By the end, the repeated phrase “they have painted and sung” opens outward, asking us to count the sun and rain among the artists.
Women Washing Their Hair — Summary
They have painted and sung the women washing their hair, and the plaits and strands in the sun, and the golden combs and the combs of elephant tusks and the combs of buffalo horn and hoof. The sun has been good to women, drying their heads of hair as they stooped and shook their shoulders and framed their faces with copper and framed their eyes with dusk or chestnut. The rain has been good to women. If the rain should forget, if the rain left off for a year — the heads of women would wither, the copper, the dusk and chestnuts, go. They have painted and sung the women washing their hair — reckon the sun and rain in, too.