The Illinois & Michigan Canal: The Last Great Canal I & M Canal Poetry Created by: Cynthia Burns Darling, Linda Forrester Bellizzi, Douglas James Hanson
Intended Grade Level: Middle Elementary	Approximate length: 2 One hour class periods
Goals/Objectives 1. Explain the legacy of the I&M canal. 2. Analyze a primary source document.
Procedures 1. Explain to the students that they will be examining poetry written about the I&M canal. Their task is to analyze the poem to gain a deeper and more personalized understanding the legacy of the I&M Canal. 2. Break students into groups of 2-3. 3. Distribute poems and analysis worksheets to each group. 4. Direct students to complete the analysis worksheet for each poem they received. 5. When groups have completed their analysis ask each group to select one poem and present their findings to the class. 6. During student presentation have students to write down examples of life on the canal. 7. Conclude the lesson with a freewrite. Ask students to do a ten-minute freewrite on “What was life like on the I&M canal?”
Materials 1. Poetry analysis worksheet 2. Select poems about the I&M canal

Poem Analysis Worksheet

Directions: Please complete the questions using the poem(s) you have received.

Title of Poem: _________________________________________________________

Date of Poem: ________ Author(s): ______________________________________

Poem Information

a. List three things the author said that you think are important?

i. _______________________________________________________________

ii. _______________________________________________________________

iii. _______________________________________________________________

b. Why do you think this poem written?

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

c, What evidence in the poem helps you know why it was written? Provide quotes to

support your statement.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

c. List two things the poem tells you about life in the United States at the time it was

written.

i. ______________________________________________________________

ii. _______________________________________________________________

d. Does the contents of the poem support or contradict what you have learned about the

I&M canal? Explain your answer.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________________

e. List two questions you have after reading/analyzing this poem.

i. ______________________________________________________________

ii. _______________________________________________________________

Joliet

ON the one hand the steel works.

On the other hand the penitentiary.

Santa Fe’ trains and Alton trains

Between smokestacks on the west

And gray walls on the east.

And Lockport down the river.

Part of the valley is God’s

And part is man’s.

The river course laid out

A thousand years ago.

The canals ten year back.

The sun on two canals and one river

Makes three stripes of silver

Or copper and gold

Or shattered sunflower leaves.

Talons of an iceberg

Scraped out this valley.

Claws of an avalanche loosed here.

Carl Sandburg

The Sesquicentennial of the Illinois and Michigan Canal

We moderns shrink—

in terms of tiff and hate,

fear, sludge, self-royalizing, shame,

We forget

much of our basic majesty,

old ingenuity, old power and dream and draft.

Memorials are useful, are reviving.

We need Commemoration. We

need large scale salute to Landmark. Monument. Canal!

The Illinois and Michigan Canal

is rich for re-perusal and respect.

This sesquicentennial

applauds continuing health and harbinger,

applauds a reconstruction of self-registry.

The health that can create canals

can open mercy; can explode

our intricate apahty and stone.

Again:

It is our business to bothers.

Gwednolyn Brooks

Illinois & Michigan Canal

And After Lake Chicago dried a store

Of glacial meltings filled the vale, surrounded

By ice and the moraine, where rocks abounded

While the water shrank with the invading shore.

Here countless wage-slaves dug a hundred miles

Of water-way, from the little town LaSalle

To Chicago, made this vain canal,

And hemmed it in with rock and driven spikes.

The railroads stretched besides it soon, and choked

Its usefulness, until the waters seeping,

Mantled with green, were sleeping.

As generation to their fate were yoked.

At Marseilles and at Henry the deserted locks

Accumulated moss, and from the ridge

Were browned and rotting bridges,

Decay and ruin overtook the docks.

What had cost million, being at last frustrate

Was all abandoned to those gravitation

Which crumble pyramids, and change the nations,
It was the slow and stealthy foot of Fate.

Now grass grows in the path of patient mules,

Now no lock-keepers to the boats are calling,

And timbers, stone are falling,

And weeds grow where the willow shadow rules.

Here where LaSalle, where Hennepin, Marquette

Sought empire, and where merchant shipping

By rails was ruined, the hour glass dripping

Of water through the gates old dream beget.

And little cities have by its bed-way grown,

And wires for power and messages are singing,

Chicago’s strength, and bringing

More desolation to its creeping, so alone

Here in the landscape dotted by towers and poles,

Where automobiles, buses road and hurry,

And where great wheels and engines worry

The lives and labors of impoverished souls.

For what are factories, what are poles and wires,

And what canals of waters,

If poverty and slaughter

Starve and take life and thwart the heart’s desires?

If exploited and broken diggers by whom

This vain canal was cut, were beaten

And by the cannibals of commerce eastern

Let weeds grow where, and let the waters scum.

Edgar Lee Masters

And eight I reared to manhood,

And I brought to Illinois

A pleasant and lively set

Of active little boys.

But death took my fifth son,

In his twenty-third year,

And O, how hard it was to part

With one that was so dear.

And in the year of fifty

Death did visit us again

In the month of November

And two of my sons were slain.

One died in California

And the other died at home,

And O, what sorrow pierced by heart

And filled my life with gloom

One of them left two daughters,

And the other two sons,

And to me they were most precious

And believed little ones.

Elsie Strawn Armstrong (1789-1871)

The foremost wagons in the slough

Were all a-stalking down

And doubling their team to

Get across the ground

The wagon master saw it,

And was troubled at the sight,

to see the teams all stopped

And the fore one in such a plight.

My son had but two yokes then,

But they were good and strong,

All five year olds and active,

To take his load along….

And as he went he “Kept a-jumping

To try the sod,” he said,

“And parting at the grass

that was above his head.”

But alas! that worthy man (wagon master)

The cholera did seize,

And in his youth and prime

He fell with that disease.

Elsie Strawn Armstrong (1789-1871)