I AM a hearthrug -- Yes, a rug -- Though I cannot describe myself as snug; Yet I know that for me they paid a price For a Turkey carpet that would suffice (But we live in an age of rascal vice). Why was I ever woven, For a clumsy lout, with a wooden leg, To come with his endless Peg! Peg! Peg! Peg! With a wooden leg, Till countless holes I'm drove in. ("Drove," I have said, and it should be "driven"; A hearthrug's blunders should be forgiven, For wretched scribblers have exercised Such endless bosh and clamour, So improvidently have improvised, That they've utterly ungrammaticised Our ungrammatical grammar). And the coals Burn holes, Or make spots like moles, And my lily-white tints, as black as your hat turn, And the housemaid (a matricide, will-forging slattern), Rolls The rolls From the plate, in shoals, When they're put to warm in front of the coals; And no one with me condoles, For the butter stains on my beautiful pattern. But the coals and rolls, and sometimes soles. Dropp'd from the frying-pan out of the fire. Are nothing to raise my indignant ire, Like the Peg! Peg! Of that horrible man with the wooden leg. This moral spread from me, Sing it, ring it, yelp it -- Never a hearthrug be, That is if you can help it. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY: LAMBERT HUTCHINS by EDGAR LEE MASTERS STORIES ARE MADE OF MISTAKES by JAMES GALVIN FICTION by GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON QUI S'EXCUSE S'ACCUSE by MARIANNE MOORE THE GREAT HUNT by CARL SANDBURG SACRED ELEGY: 5. THE SEPARATION OF MAN FROM GOD by GEORGE BARKER |