“Population Drifts” a poem by Carl Sandburg, is mainly stimulating as it compares the effects of nation state and urban environments on the human situation. In the poem, Sandburg creates a portrait of an extremely powerful woman in the first verse that states as follows:
“A woman whose ribs had the power of the hills in them and her hands were tough for work and there was passion for life in her womb”.
As stated by Hill , the year 1919 is known to be the progressive era as it brought the new woman to the scene: a woman who worked, and had more financial freedom, making her less dependent on her husband or father.
In the poem, Sandburg describes the immigrant woman as a physically strong woman who can climb the hills; though she is pregnant, and she has the toughness in her hands to work for a living. The woman and her husband had beat down faces due to the poverty they had gone through. Two of her children suffered from adenoids, who could neither walk nor talk. Adenoid is a lymphatic tissue next to the nasal cavity on the top of the nasopharynx, where the nose blends into the throat, which can grow until about age 6, then involute through adulthood . Sandburg changes the focus in the fourth stanza, as he speaks of the two children who work in the factory where pasteboards are used. The two children are insecure of the visions working in the factory, as they feel the mown hay in their home-town was a better option.
Comparing the generation of the parents, it is noticeable that the next generation would
be different. The woman and her husband lived their life by cutting grass, and later moved across oceans for better opportunities. The children worked in the box factory that is completely different from what the parents did throughout their life. Many Hispanic immigrants work in low-skilled, low-paying jobs, while the majority of Asian immigrants are more educated and are in higher-skilled occupations .
Works Cited
Basu, Moni. "Immigrants in America: The second-generation story." 07 February 2013. CNN. Newsletter. <http://inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2013/02/07/immigrants-in-america-the-second-generation-story/>.
Luijkx, Tim and Mohammed Wahba. "Adenoids." n.d. http://radiopaedia.org/. http://radiopaedia.org/. Web. 27 October 2014. <http://radiopaedia.org/articles/adenoids-1>.
Mageland, Chelsea. What’s going on in the early 1900′s? n.d. WordPress. Web. 27 October 2014. <http://historyofsexuality.umwblogs.org/topic-1/early-1900s/>.
