Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE PARLOR JOKE, by ROBERT FROST


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE PARLOR JOKE, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: You won't hear unless I tell you
Last Line: If it's trouble up-to-date.
Subject(s): Immigrants


You won't hear unless I tell you
How the few to turn a penny
Built complete a modern city
Where there shouldn't have been any,
And then conspired to fill it
With the miserable many.

They drew on Ellis Island.
They had but to raise a hand
To let the living deluge
On the basin of the land.
They did it just like nothing
In smiling self-command.

If you asked them their opinion,
They declared the job as good
As when, to fill the sluices,
They turned the river flood;
Only then they dealt with water
And now with human blood.

Then the few withdrew in order
To their villas on the hill,
Where they watched from easy couches
The uneasy city fill.
"If it isn't good," they ventured,
"At least it isn't ill."

But with child and wife to think of,
They weren't taking any chance.
So they fortified their windows
With a screen of potted plants,
And armed themselves from somewhere
With a manner and a glance.

You know how a bog of sphagnum
Beginning with a scum
Will climb the side of a mountain,
So the poor began to come,
Climbing the hillside suburb
From the alley and the slum.

As their tenements crept nearer,
It pleased the rich to assume,
In humorous self-pity,
The mockery of gloom
Because the poor insisted
On wanting all the room.

And there it might have ended
In a feeble parlor joke,
Where a gentle retribution
Overtook the gentlefolk;
But that some beheld a vision:
Out of stench and steam and smoke,

Out of vapor of sweat and breathing,
They saw materialize
Above the darkened city
Where the murmur never dies,
A shape that had to cower
Not to knock against the skies.

They could see it through a curtain,
They could see it through a wall,
A lambent swaying presence
In wind and rain and all,
With its arms abroad in heaven
Like a scarecrow in a shawl.

There were some who thought they heard it
When it seemed to try to talk
But missed articulation
With a little hollow squawk,
Up indistinct in the zenith,
Like the note of the evening hawk.

Of things about the future
Its hollow chest was full,
Something about rebellion
And blood a dye for wool,
And how you may pull the world down
If you know the prop to pull.

What to say to the wisdom
That could tempt a nation's fate
By invoking such a spirit
To reduce the labor-rate!
Some people don't mind trouble
If it's trouble up-to-date.





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