Here was a place where none would ever come
For shelter, save as we did from the rain.
We saw no ghost, yet once outside again
Each wondered why the other should be so dumb;
And ruin, and to our vision it was plain
Where thrift, outshivering fear, had let remain
Some chairs that were like skeletons of home.
There were no trackless footsteps on the floor
Above us, and there were no sounds elsewhere.
But there was more than sound; and there was more
Than just an axe that once was in the air
Between us and the chimney, long before
Our time. So townsmen said who found her there.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Haunted House- Edwin Arlington Robinson
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We read a Robinson poem in Mark's class this week and I liked both "Richard Cory" and the other poem that I found in the LA book.
ReplyDeleteI tried to find another brief poem by him online and this is one that I found. I like Robinson's style of having some sort of twist at the end of each of his poems, such as Richard Cory's suicide. Here the twist is this woman who apparently was killed there and now haunts this house.
I like the feeling of the poem, which is created through the use of certain words. "Ghost," "fear," "skeleton," and "axe" are some of the words that create the feeling of the house being haunted without Robinson ever explicitly saying that it is.
I overall like his poems because i love twists, but the beginnings of his poems i find borrrrinnnnggg
ReplyDeleteAnd Lev I don't doubt that a woman has died here, but did you get that right from the context or did you read a summary on the poem because I dont see where that came from, but it might have just flown over my head, hehe!
ReplyDeleteThat was my conclusion. First, the poem says there was no ghost, which meant that they expected to see a ghost. The same thing applies to the trackless footsteps, like some murderer that went up the stairs. And then there is the mention of the axe flying through the air, which was this murderer killing the girl.
ReplyDeleteSo the kids didn't see it, although "there was more than sound." So something else happened there, and the townsmen who found the dead girl there support this. Maybe that's totally wrong, but that was the first thing that I saw in this poem.