I Am the People, the Mob

The shift from Line 4’s depiction of the people as the “audience that witnesses history” to Line 5’s statement that they “are the seed ground,” depicts a movement from the urban industrial people to the rural agricultural people. While the vast number of agricultural workers are only mentioned by their being “maker[s] of the world’s food” (Line 3), Line 5 contains a series of agricultural symbols and motifs elaborating on the people’s importance in farming. The relationship between the people and the land they work is so important that they become inseparable. Using the same construction, the speaker uses to state that they are “the workingman, the inventor” (Line 3) and a variety of others, the speaker states they are also “the seed ground” and “a prairie” (Line 5) by way of demonstrating this essential symbolic (and material) connection between the working proletariat and the land.

This connection goes beyond mere equation, as well. “[S]eed ground” (Line 5) refers to the seed-like fruits that plants such as what produce, and more generally the term can be understood to refer to any part of the plant related to propagation. Like the general meaning of “seed ground,” the people are generative and productive, but like the more particular meaning, that productive potential is “ground” like wheat’s seed-like fruits.