The neighbor I've never really known.
I was born in Chicago Illinois, and I've lived within an hours drive for most of my life, but I have never really seen the city as alive and real, it was just someplace that you could go to see the Cubs play, or to see people all crazy with business and money. I identify with the blue collar workers and farmers; business and the Symphony and the Chicago Stock Exchange are foreign to me, and somehow not as alive and real. DeKalb Illinois is real. My great great grandfather moved here from Whales and was a gentleman farmer, and my grand mother was a teacher, and my friends" parents were factory workers. I never realized that my grandfathers" crops were sent to Chicago to be distributed through out the country, and that Chicago was built on factories and industry, the tall buildings and the Chicago Stock Exchange were built on the backs of those factory workers, and distributors.
The poem "Chicago" by Carl Sandburg introduced me to someone I had known about for years, but had never really known. The poet uses several techniques of figurative speech to bring vibrancy and familiarity to the description of the poems topic Chicago Illinois.
Personification, simile and synecdoche are used throughout the poem to bring the description of a city to life.
Personification, the representation of an abstract quality or idea as a person, is found throughout the poem. "Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning"(14,15) and " here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the soft little cities"(16,17) are striking examples of well used personification that would be flat lifeless descriptions if stated without use of this figure of speech. "Chicago is proud of its blue collar workers" just doesn't do the trick, personification and the other figurative speech make it poetry. In the end of the poem Sandburg describes the city as laughing, another use of personification that adds such depth to his depiction.