Classic and Contemporary Poetry
HISTORY, by MALCOLM COWLEY 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. | 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 THE PETTY BOURGEOISIE by ROQUE DALTON |
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