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Classic and Contemporary Poetry
HISTORY, by MALCOLM COWLEY Poet Analysis Poet's Biography First Line: If I told you that in this house Last Line: Nothing more than this. Subject(s): History; Home; Historians | |||
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...THE BRITISH COUNTRYSIDE IN PICTURES by JAMES MCMICHAEL THE HISTORY OF MY LIFE by JOHN ASHBERY INITIAL CONDITIONS by MARVIN BELL THE DREAM SONGS: 290 by JOHN BERRYMAN THE EROTICS OF HISTORY by EAVAN BOLAND THEM AND US by LUCILLE CLIFTON |
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