Killers karl sandburg
...onal matter to Sandburg. The second and third stanza use great imagery to convey Sandburg’s negative notion toward war. Second stanza deals with conscription and emphasizes the great size of war, “sixteen million men” and also makes conscious the fact that the sixteen million men are of the optimum of their class with “shining teeth”, “sharp eyes” and “hard legs”, which reflect his negative stance as in the third stanza the death of these fine young men is graphically narrated. He refers to their blood as “red juice”, reflecting the life, the fuel, the ambition and the potential that that young blood held. Once again he emphasizes the size of the war, and once again reminds the reader of the brutal job the men are carrying out in a very bold and chilling statement, “sixteen million are killing… and killing and killing”. The third stanza to remind us of the brutality, and great loss that war encompasses. The fourth stanza is a very different stanza. It is a reflective stanza through which Sandburg expresses his sorrow for the people at home, the lives which once held happiness, families and dreams are now shattered because of lost loved ones who died fighting. He speaks of never forgetting and memories of those men. He expresses his appreciation though these, furthermore as he relates personally to the soldiers, “They beat on my head… They pound on my heart”. The Fifth stanza confirms a personal past experience of Sandburg though his use of olfactory auditory first hand experiences of the aura of war, “I wake in the night and smell the trenches, And hear the low stir of sleepers in lines”. He repeats “sixteen million” and states “some of them long sleepers for always”. Through the reiteration and the line Sandburg confronts the reader with a harsh reality, recalling again the great amount of deaths incorporated with war. The final stanza covers two most basic situations of the soldier...