Analysis of the poem "Prayer of Steel" by Carl Sanburg

orison of Steel

Carl Sandburg

(1878-1967)

Lay me on an anvil, O God

Beat me and dick me into a crowbar.

Let me pry short old walls.

Let me lift and loosen old foundations

Lay me on an anvil, Oh God.

Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike.

Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together.

Take red-hot rivets and restrain me into the central girders.

Let me be the not bad(p) nail holding a skyscraper together through blue nights into white stars.

A formalist reading of the poem

Prayer of Steel is a short poem composed of 9 lines, the ninth being the longest. The cohesive devices in the poem provide be analyzed on three levels: lexical, grammatical, and phonological. The analysis go out be made first of the individual stanzas, then of the general structure of the whole poem. Leechs concept of cohesion will be referred to where necessary.

General observations

The title Prayers of Steel is an example of foregrounding: steel is a kind of metal, thus it is inanimate and cannot perform the action of apothegm prayers, an action performed only by a human being. Obviously, the poet has deviated from the by and large observed rulles of the language, and it is significant that these are prayers of steel, not of rubber.



The inference is that any(prenominal) the speaker wishes to accomplish will require a great deal of strength and determination. From the title, foregrounding then extends into the poem so that we have cohesion of foregrounding, in which the foregrounded features identified in isolation are related to one another, and to the poem as a whole, as can be observed below.

Cohesion in the individual stanzas

Stanza 1

Lexical cohesion: First we observe that among all the images use in the first stanza, there...

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