For me, Carl Sandburg's "Grass" represents how society often operates in cycles and leaves nature and time to cover it's wrong doings, which can be read positively or negatively.
The poem mentions some of the bloodiest battles from the 19th and 20th century, in saying, "Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo/...And pile them high at Gettysburg/ And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun." These battles had many casualties; however, as the speaker suggests, the grass is still able to grow and cover these hurts. In a sense, this is inspiring and leaves the impression that time can cure all hurt and mankind will always be able to bounce back, even in its darkest of hours.
On the other hand, this poem reveals how easily time can make people forget. As the grass grows and covers the damages of war, people begin to forget the carnage that lays underneath its surface. Although they are left with the beautiful grass in place of a bloody battlefield, there is a danger in forgetting the mistakes of the past. The poem makes a cycle in saying, "let me work" at the beginning and end of the poem. This demonstrates how time never stops and society is, in some sense, doomed to make the same mistakes of the past.
I think you make a good point here about how the poem shows us how easily we forget violence in our history. The part about how people will ask where they are just a few years after the battle, and the fields of battle are restored to their original condition really spoke to me because of a recent visit by my family to Gettysburg. I also think that the poem addresses and equilibrium that humankind has found. Violence is inevitable, and yet somehow we always find a way to reset a setting to its original conditions. Nevertheless, because of these battles people are dead, and although the fields will grow back to their original state, the people lost in these wars are forever gone, which makes war all too real.
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