Sherwood Anderson’s “Chicago” gives us a speaker who keeps changing shape: one moment a mature man standing above the cornfields, another a confused child no clothes or minds can fit. There is enormous ambition and sensitivity here—he wants leisure to become beautiful, wants prayer and weeping—but feels isolated, as if no one comes to meet him. The mood is restless, lonely, and full of ache, yet also full of defiant love for life. He declares he will do “deeds of fiery meaning,” then shrinks to a tiny, dirty, unknowing figure sunk in swampy land. By the end, youth and age, raw energy and exhaustion, song and choking silence all blur together. The poem feels like an inner American landscape: vast, unfinished, tender, and at war with itself.
Chicago — Summary
I am mature, a man child, in America, in the West, in the great valley of the Mississippi. My head arises above the cornfields. I stand up among the new corn.
I am a child, a confused child in a confused world. There are no clothes made that fit me. The minds of men cannot clothe me. Great projects arise within me. I have a brain and it is cunning and shrewd.
I want leisure to become beautiful, but there is no leisure. Men should bathe me with prayers and with weeping, but there are no men.
Now — from now — from to-day I shall do deeds of fiery meaning. Songs shall arise in my throat and hurt me.
I am a little thing, a tiny little thing on the vast prairies. I know nothing. My mouth is dirty. I cannot tell what I want. My feet are sunk in the black swampy land, but I am a lover. I love life. In the end love shall save me.
The days are long — it rains — it snows. I am an old man. I am sweeping the ground where my grave shall be.
Look upon me, my beloved, my lover who does not come. I am raw and bleeding, a new thing in a new world. I run swiftly o'er bare fields. Listen — there is the sound of the tramping of many feet. Life is dying in me. I am old and palsied. I am just at the beginning of my life.
Do you not see that I am old, O my beloved? Do you not understand that I cannot sing, that my songs choke me? Do you not see that I am so young I cannot find the word in the confusion of words?