Carl Sandburg's "Mummy"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 25 October 2023

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today’s poem is by Carl August Sandburg (January 6, 1878 – July 22, 1967), an American poet, biographer, journalist, and editor. He won three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. During his lifetime, Sandburg was widely regarded as "a major figure in contemporary literature", especially for volumes of his collected verse, including Chicago Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), and Smoke and Steel(1920).[2] He enjoyed "unrivaled appeal as a poet in his day, perhaps because the breadth of his experiences connected him with so many strands of American life".[3] When he died in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson observed that "Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He was America."[4]

—Bio via Wikipedia

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:05.2	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Tuesday, October 24th, 2023.
0:10.7	Today's poem is by Carl Sandberg, and it's called Mummy.
0:17.7	I'll read it once, offer a few comments, then read it one more time.
0:23.6	Mummy
0:24.3	Blood is blood and bone is bone.
0:30.7	All bloods are red and all bones white.
0:34.2	The beginning is being born.
0:36.3	The end is being dead.
0:38.7	The magnificent repeated themes of line and color forming the final exterior of a pharaoh mummy
0:45.0	try to appeal otherwise and fix an affirmation of the blood there yet and the bones there
0:51.5	yet.
0:53.2	Nevertheless, and for all the exquisite patterning,
0:56.6	the blood is dry as dust,
0:58.1	and the bones obey no voices telling them to rise and walk.
1:03.7	Some such pharaohs are born with a name,
1:07.1	one more of a line of names.
1:09.8	Some such pharaohs die with music and mourning,
1:13.1	and sleep under careful epitaphs.
1:16.7	Yet they, and the scrubs, the rabble, the hoi-poly,
1:21.5	end in the same democracy,
1:23.8	to never fail them all,
	...

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