Where I Come From And Sandburg's 'Chicago'

Brewster’s “Where I Come From” and Sandburg’s “Chicago” portrays urban environments, exploring how the poets feel towards their respective cities. In “Where I come from” the poet was being critical towards the city life and show the contrast between urban and rural, whereas “Chicago” expresses his fondness towards the city even if there was many problems to it. In “Where I come from” Elizabeth Brewster makes a comparison between modern city and rural area. She did this by using tones and vocabulary, which allows the reader to picture the images clearly. As the reader read along the poem they can picture “polluted”, “crowded” and “noisy” to the city and “quiet”, “peaceful” and “calm” towards the countryside.
The structure of the poem is free verse and the syllables in the first stanza are messy. In stanza one the there is more syllables and they are all different. This could suggest that the city life is untidy. People
are always busy and working. In stanza two the syllables are a bit more organized than the first stanza. The syllables are closer to each other which could suggest the life is simpler than the city. The way she structured her poem shows the differences between the lifestyle between urban and rural. The poet creates the imagery by using sense. An example would be “Smell of smog”. Smog has no smell, so the author is trying to point out that the absence of nature’s smell. On the contrary “tulips” were supposed to have a strong natural smell but unfortunately it was covered by smog and the poet wasn’t able to smell it anymore. All was left behind was the small part of the memory toward the natural smell. Brewster also create a contrast between the smog’s smell and the barely smell of the tulips. Another point about the smell was that it is a repetition. The word “smell” was repeated many times in the first stanza, remaining the importance of the sense and showed how different urban and rural was. An example would be “smell of work” “glue factories” the poet uses sense to critical the city’s factories and industries. By using the sense, we could imagine the pollution in the air and how disgusting it was to live in a place full of glue and plastic smells. Although the poet was being critical towards the city, so also gave out some negative point toward the countryside. “Clucking aimlessly” shows that people in the rural have no idea of what they are doing or doing it for no purpose. This makes the city stands out because the city was busy and people know what they are aiming for. Again, this shows the contrast of the different life style in city and in rural. Overall, Brewster shows the description of an urban, rural area and gave out the negative points to each other.
She pointed out the bad things about the city, so people will be willing to change this situation. “Chicago” is a tough place for tough people. This poem is a about the strength and power of the city and the citizens who lived in Chicago. The poem portrays an image of a vibrant, cunning, wicked and joyful of the modern city life. In the first stanza, the poet started off tough and strong. “Butcher” “Maker” and “Stacker” from these jobs we can tell that these are tough works, and the way it is organized makes the stanza energetic, powerful and fast pace when it comes through even though it doesn’t have any rhythm. From the word “me” we can tell that the poem is said by a speaker. Although the poem didn’t know who the speaker is, but by the way he present the poem we can tell that he really love Chicago. WE can tell that this speaker are pride in celebrating their home city and joyful for being able to share his felling with the
reader.
The poem is filled with personification by portraying the city itself into a muscular labor. In Line 10-12, the speaker found that the beauty of Chicago was not delicate. In the city, there would be prostitute, criminals and starvation, but Chicago was “proud” to live in this coarse. The poet established his love toward this tough city by accepting all the problems in Chicago. The poem juxtaposition to show the theme of city. In stanza four, “bareheaded…rebuilding” This tells the reader that the place is always being built and torn down which could be a nightmare for those workers and labors. However the reader will feel as if they were at the middle of the construction in those line and got an industrial image of people working and where they are expanding their nation. This poem shows the theme of love towards his city. Sandburg loved d the whole brutal, messy city in all of its complexity, and he loved it for its strengths. At the beginning he spot the negative parts of the city, but at the end he argues back at the outsiders who said horrible things to Chicago.