Personification. Personification is a figure of speech in which an idea, animal, or thing is described as if it were a person. As you read, decide what is personified in this poem.
Parallelism. Parallelism is a rhetorical technique in which a writer emphasizes the equal value or weight of two or more ideas by expressing them in the same grammatical form. Identify instances of parallelism in “Grass.”
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Although he was a veteran of the Spanish-American War, Sandburg hated warfare. The following simple poem, “Grass,” is one of the most eloquent antiwar poems ever written, all the more so because of its simplicity. The poem alludes, or refers, to several battlefields—Austerlitz and Waterloo from the Napoleonic Wars, Gettysburg from the American Civil War, and Ypres and Verdun from World War I.
Have you ever visited a historical site where a famous person lived, a battle was fought, or a treaty was signed? How is the site different now? What emotions did visiting the site evoke in you?
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