Life & Wisdom Quote by Carl Sandburg

Sandburg calls poetry a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. The metaphor honors poetry as an invisible writing, a text that flickers at the edge of perception. A rainbow appears when light meets water and angle, but it cannot be touched, kept, or even approached; it vanishes as the observer moves. Poetry, too, glows where experience bends through memory and language, revealing shapes that are real yet intangible. It describes the making of wonder and also its passing, not merely by offering facts but by tracing the feelings that cling to appearance and disappearance. The line marries how and why: science explains refraction, but poetry explains what such beauty asks of the heart, and why absence follows presence like a shadow.

Calling the script phantom suggests that poems themselves are made of breath and time. They are inscriptions on air, written in the mind, often legible only for a moment before they shift. That ephemerality is not a weakness; it is the means by which poetry matches the phenomena it tries to hold. To speak truly about a rainbow, the language must shimmer and fade; to speak truly about joy, grief, hope, and loss, the poem must admit their motion.

Sandburg, the Midwestern modernist with a democratic ear, loved to define poetry in playful, homespun metaphors. He wrote in free verse about cities, workers, cornfields, and steel, fusing plain speech with lyric surprise. The rainbow suits his American vision: a promise arcing over ordinary life, bright enough to stop the day, then gone, leaving people to return to their tasks. Poetry, in his view, belongs there, too, among toil and weather, explaining not with equations but with human meaning. It tells how wonder forms out of the world we all share and why even the most luminous moments cannot last, teaching us to look harder while they do.