Complete Modern Home No. 115Sears, Roebuck & Company ~ 1908 - 1940
Similar to so many homes right here in my Indiana Neighborhood!
Including the one I lived in years ago as a student in South Bend.
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When my cousin Maggie sent me the following photograph, I couldn't help thinking of "The House With Nobody In It" by Joyce Kilmer. Maggie's caption perfectly condenses the sentiment of the poem:
"Whenever I see abandoned houses I wonder about the family that used to live there. The excitement when the house was first built, the children who ran through those rooms, the meals that were served and shared. The happiness and even the pain. Oh, if walls could talk!"
~ Maggie Mesneak Wick* ~
The House with Nobody In It
Whenever I walk to Suffern along the Erie track
I go by a poor old farmhouse with its shingles broken and black.
I suppose I've passed it a hundred times, but I always stop for a minute
And look at the house, the tragic house, the house with nobody in it.
I never have seen a haunted house, but I hear there are such things;
That they hold the talk of spirits, their mirth and sorrowings.
I know this house isn't haunted, and I wish it were, I do;
For it wouldn't be so lonely if it had a ghost or two.
This house on the road to Suffern needs a dozen panes of glass,
And somebody ought to weed the walk and take a scythe to the grass.
It needs new paint and shingles, and the vines should be trimmed and tied;
But what it needs the most of all is some people living inside.
If I had a lot of money and all my debts were paid
I'd put a gang of men to work with brush and saw and spade.
I'd buy that place and fix it up the way it used to be
And I'd find some people who wanted a home and give it to them free.
Now, a new house standing empty, with staring window and door,
Looks idle, perhaps, and foolish, like a hat on its block in the store.
But there's nothing mournful about it; it cannot be sad and lone
For the lack of something within it that it has never known.
But a house that has done what a house should do, a house that has sheltered life,
That has put its loving wooden arms around a man and his wife,
A house that has echoed a baby's laugh and held up his stumbling feet,
Is the saddest sight, when it's left alone, that ever your eyes could meet.
So whenever I go to Suffern along the Erie track
I never go by the empty house without stopping and looking back,
Yet it hurts me to look at the crumbling roof and the shutters fallen apart,
For I can't help thinking the poor old house is a house with a broken heart.
by American poet Joyce Kilmer(1886-1918)
best known for the occasionally parodied poem, "Trees"
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have been paired with Kilmer's poem.
Click here to see more.
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I'm also reminded of a couple of songs
1. "You're Beautiful Just As You Are,"
sung by Oscar the Grouch
in one of Ben and Sam's favorite childhood videos:
Don't Eat the Pictures:
"Broken and beautiful, fractured and rare
Missing pieces that used to be there . . .
Broken and beautiful, cracked but okay
Can't imagine who'd throw you away . . ."
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2. And Janis Ian's classic, "Memories"
(mentioned elsewhere on this blog):
"There are memories within the walls and tapestries . . . "
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Lastly (and also mentioned a few times before) is Philip Larkin's abbreviated sonnet; for surely this poem cries out for a final quatrain, but, no, that's all there is, no fitting conclusion, no closure, no fond farewell, just the "poor old house . . . with a broken heart," the "shot . . . long fallen wide":
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft
And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.
The Bereft Music Room With Nobody In It: Too Sad to Explain
Photography by Aaron B. Carriker
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*For more insights from my Cousin Extraordinaire,
Maggie Mesneak Wick:
Empty Nest
The Still Small Voice of Heaven
Here Comes Peter Cottontail, Or Not
See also: The Mailbox Without a House
P.S.
Things break; things can be mended:
Kintsugi / Kintsukuroi
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Tuesday, May 14th
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my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com
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KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com
Thanks to my friend Marguerite for sending the following poem; she writes: Here is another poem by Maori Poet Hone Tuwhare which really resonated with this former farm girl from the 1950s and 60s in Arkansas. The images that immediately popped into my mind were those of all the abandoned farm houses in rural Kansas and Iowa as one drives through those states. Just as urbanization has reduced Maori homes in rural NZ to mere shells, the loss of rural (and "cultural") heritage is universal, whether in the farm belt of middle America, on tribal lands in Arizona and New Mexico where I traveled again in 2012, or in rural Brazil, when I was there last year.
ReplyDelete"The Old Place"
by Hone Tuwhare (NZ Prominent Maori Poet)
No one comes
by way of the doughy track
through straggly tea tree bush
and gorse, past the hidden spring
and bitter cress.
Under the chill moon's light
no one cares to look upon
the drunken fence-posts
and the gate white with moss.
No one except the wind
saw the old place
make her final curtsy
to the sky and earth:
and in no protesting sense
did iron and barbed wire
ease to the rust's invasion
nor twang more tautly
to the wind's slap and scream.
On the cream-lorry
or morning paper van
no one comes,
for no one will ever leave
the golden city on the fussy train;
and there will be no more waiting
on the hill beside the quiet tree
where the old place falters
because no one comes any more
no one.
found in "An Anthology of Twentieth Century New Zealand Poetry," edited by Vincent O'Sullivan
Thanks to Barbara McFadden for sharing these lyrics:
ReplyDeleteHouse Where Nobody Lives
Sung by Tom Waits
There's a house on my block that's abandoned and cold
The folks moved out of it a long time ago
And they took all their things and they never came back
It looks like it's haunted with the windows all cracked
Everyone calls it the house
The house where nobody lives
Once it held laughter
Once it held dreams, did they throw it away,
did they know what it means?
Did someone's heart break
Or did someone do somebody wrong?
Well, the paint is all cracked,
it was peeled off of the wood
The papers were stacked on the porch where I stood
And the weeds had grown up just as high as the door
There were birds in the chimney and an old chest of drawers
Looks like no one will ever come back
To the house where nobody lives
Oh, and once it held laughter
Once it held dreams, did they throw it away,
did they know what it means?
Did someone's heart break
Or did someone do somebody wrong?
So if you find someone
Someone to have, someone to hold,
don't trade it for silver
Oh, don't trade it for gold
'Cause I have all of life's treasures
nd they're fine and they're good
They remind me that houses are just made of wood
What makes a house grand,
oh, it ain't the roof or the doors
If there's love in a house, it's a palace for sure
But without love it ain't nothin' but a house
A house where nobody lives
But without love
It ain't nothin' but a house, a house where nobody lives
Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Thomas Alan Waits
House Where Nobody Lives
lyrics © BMG Rights Management
Jalma Music