Languages

“To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence” by James Elroy Flecker (1911)

While Sandburg’s “Languages” ultimately laments the death of languages as a living means of communication, James Elroy Flecker’s “To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence” represents the opposite point of view: Flecker celebrates written language as the means by which Flecker can still send a message to a poet living a thousand years after his own time. Flecker details the eternal joys and emotions of life that humans in all times and cultures can share.

“Sonnet 55” by William Shakespeare (1609)

A sonnet by William Shakespeare featured on the Poetry Foundation website, in which Shakespeare celebrates poetry as a means by which human emotion and memory can be immortalized. As with Flecker’s poem above, Shakespeare’s sonnet offers a different angle on the nature of language and contradicts Sandburg’s view in “Languages” by depicting the written word as something that has the power to transcend and defy time instead of succumbing to it.

“Bronzes” by Carl Sandburg (1916)

A poem by Sandburg describing and reflecting upon monuments to famous men. Thematically similar to “Languages” in the sense that this poem also meditates upon the nature of time and the ultimate fragility of human memory.