If I told you that in this house with boarded windows, where doors gape stupidly, where grey wallpaper twists away from the plaster like the whorls of a dead brain -- If I told you that in this house there lived Solomon Carney; that he built the fireplace with a trowel and a hammer and his two hands; that John and Rebecca died here of smallpox in the year when the doctor was held at Beulah, twenty miles away; or about the last son, Amos, who cleared the back fields and married in time and was crushed in the first steam thresher; and about his children that moved West (O the slow bleeding of the soil) If I told you this it would mean as much to you as an entry in a second-hand Bible -- no more. And yet the Rome of Edward Gibbon, seven volumes of print, cast in eight point solid with footnotes, contains nothing more than this. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...YOUR MISSION by ELLEN M. HUNTINGTON GATES EPITAPH (ON A COMMONPLACE PERSON WHO DIED IN BED) by AMY LEVY PEARLS OF THE FAITH: 26. AL-MUZIL by EDWIN ARNOLD AN EMISSARY TO HEAVEN by WILLIAM ROSE BENET LONG AGO by CLARA EXLINE BOCKOVEN INTRUSION by MAXWELL BODENHEIM |