For my first blog, I am going to re-print a very rare essay about a Carl Sandburg poem. Enjoy.
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The Elements of Happiness

There is a poem by Carl Sandburg called "Happiness", in which the speaker tries to find out "what is happiness". This modern Socrates visits people he presumes might know: professors, businessmen, etc., but all of them just smile as if he were playing a joke on them, trying to analyize the unanalyizable. But then he comes across this scene:

"I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees
with their women and children and a keg of beer
and an accordian"

This stanza contains five elements which, working in harmony, make for the happiness that Sandburg contrasts with the wisdom of the professors or the power of the businessmen. His archetypally happy Hungarians have:

a) 'a crowd'
b) are 'under the trees'
c) are 'with their women and children'
d) have 'a keg of beer'
e) have 'an accordion'

These five elements contribute to happiness in the following ways. The crowd means that the people have companionship and comaraderie, talk and argument, other faces, other hands, smiles, laughter, eyes, breasts, and buttocks. They avoid loneliness.They are together with their own kind.

The importance of being under the trees is that the people are out in the midst of the nature which bore them, taking shade in its peace and beauty. They are not locked away inside and isolated but are out in the open, plugged into the stirring mass of Life.They are connected to the greater framework of not only their own kind but all kinds.

That they have their women and children with them means that they have intimacy, love, and passion. They are part of a growing, vital, reproducing organism. They have those to give them pleasure and those to cause them grief. Those to teach and those to be taught by.Those to talk to and play with and kiss.They have no worries of lost loved ones. They are connected to both Life and Love.

These solid Hungarians have a keg of beer. This represents not drunkeness but material plenty and high spirits.They drink their beer and probably eat, have leisure and play. To top it of they have an accordian, meaning they have music, and one imagines, dancing. Music is the element of happiness that prefects the whole by forging a link to the transcendant, to a higher joy through the emotion and beauty provided by music. Music is the crown and seal of happiness.

Thus Sandburg creates a vivid image of exactly what happiness is through the use of these five elements. Sandburg's crowd of Hungarians having a party acheive what all the professors and businessmen will never have: each other, nature, their families, zest, spirit, and joy. They are what happiness is.