The Dover Anthology of American Literature Volume II (92 page)

                        
shake off the cold.

                        
Here is a great woman

                        
on her side in the bed.

                        
She is sick,

                        
perhaps vomiting,

                        
perhaps laboring

                        
to give birth to

                        
a
tenth child. Joy! Joy!

                        
Night is a room

                        
darkened for lovers,

                        
through the jalousies the sun

                        
has sent one gold needle!

                        
I pick the hair from her eyes

                        
and watch her misery

                        
with compassion.

S
OURCE:
William Carlos Williams.
Sour Grapes
. Boston: The Four Seas Company, 1921.

Complete
Destruction
(1921)

                            
It was an icy day.

                            
We buried the cat,

                            
then took her box

                            
and set fire to it

                            
in the back yard.

                            
Those fleas that escaped

                            
earth and fire

                            
died by the cold.

S
OURCE:
William Carlos Williams.
Sour Grapes
. Boston: The Four Seas Company, 1921.

The
Widow's Lament in Springtime
(1921)

                        
Sorrow is my own yard

                        
where the new grass

                        
flames as it has flamed

                        
often before but not

                        
with the cold fire

                        
that closes round me this year.

                        
Thirtyfive years

                        
I lived with my husband.

                        
The plumtree is white today

                        
with masses of flowers.

                        
Masses of flowers

                        
load
the cherry branches

                        
and color some bushes

                        
yellow and some red

                        
but the grief in my heart

                        
is stronger than they

                        
for though they were my joy

                        
formerly, today I notice them

                        
and turn away forgetting.

                        
Today my son told me

                        
that in the meadows,

                        
at the edge of the heavy woods

                        
in the distance, he saw

                        
trees of white flowers.

                        
I feel that I would like

                        
to go there

                        
and fall into those flowers

                        
and sink into the marsh near them.

S
OURCE:
William Carlos Williams.
Sour Grapes
. Boston: The Four Seas Company, 1921.

The
Lonely Street
(1921)

                
School is over. It is too hot

                
to walk at ease. At ease

                
in light frocks they walk the streets

                
to while the time away.

                
They have grown tall. They hold

                
pink flames in their right hands.

                
In white from head to foot,

                
with sidelong, idle look—

                
in yellow, floating stuff,

                
black sash and stockings—

                
touching their avid mouths

                
with pink sugar on a stick—

                
like a carnation each holds in her hand—

                
they mount the lonely street.

S
OURCE:
William Carlos Williams.
Sour Grapes
. Boston: The Four Seas
560

The
Great Figure
(1921)

                            
Among the rain

                            
and lights

                            
I saw the figure 5

                            
in gold

                            
on a red

                            
firetruck

                            
moving

                            
with weight and urgency

                            
tense

                            
unheeded

                            
to gong clangs

                            
siren howls

                            
and wheels rumbling

                            
through the dark city.

S
OURCE:
William Carlos Williams.
Sour Grapes
. Boston: The Four Seas Company, 1921.

THEODORE
DREISER

In this story, Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945), famous for his naturalistic novels
Sister Carrie
and
An American Tragedy
, describes the touching, pathetic hallucinations of a widower.

The
Lost Phœbe
(1916)

T
HEY LIVED TOGETHER
in a part of the country which was not so prosperous as it had once been, about three miles from one of those small towns that, instead of increasing in population, is steadily decreasing. The territory was not very thickly settled; perhaps a house every other mile or so, with large areas of corn- and wheat-land and fallow fields that at odd seasons had been sown to timothy and clover. Their particular house was part log and part frame, the log portion being the old original home of Henry's grandfather. The new portion, of now rain-beaten, time-worn slabs, through which the wind squeaked in the chinks at times, and which several overshadowing elms and a butternut-tree made picturesque and reminiscently pathetic, but a little damp, was erected by Henry when he was twenty-one and just married.

That was forty-eight years before. The furniture inside, like the house outside, was old and mildewy and reminiscent of an earlier day. You have seen the what-not of cherry wood, perhaps, with spiral legs and fluted top. It was there. The old-fashioned four poster bed, with its ball-like protuberances and deep curving incisions, was there also, a sadly alienated descendant of an early Jacobean ancestor. The bureau of cherry was also high and wide and solidly built, but faded-looking, and with a musty odor. The rag carpet that underlay all these sturdy examples of enduring furniture was a weak, faded, lead-and-pink-colored affair woven by
Phœbe
Ann's own hands, when she was fifteen years younger than she was when she died. The creaky wooden loom on which it had been done now stood like a dusty, bony skeleton, along with a broken rocking-chair, a worm-eaten clothes-press—Heaven knows how old—a lime-stained bench that had once been used to keep flowers on outside the door, and other decrepit factors of household utility, in an east room that was a lean-to against this so-called main portion. All sorts of other broken-down furniture were about this place; an antiquated clothes-horse, cracked in two of its ribs; a broken mirror in an old cherry frame, which had fallen from a nail and cracked itself three days before their youngest son, Jerry, died; an extension hat-rack, which once had had porcelain knobs on the ends of its pegs; and a sewing-machine, long since outdone in its clumsy mechanism by rivals of a newer generation.

The orchard to the east of the house was full of gnarled old apple-trees, worm-eaten as to trunks and branches, and fully ornamented with green and white lichens, so that it had a sad, greenish-white, silvery effect in moonlight. The low outhouses, which had once housed chickens, a horse or two, a cow, and several pigs, were covered with patches of moss as to their roof, and the sides had been free of paint for so long that they were blackish gray as to color, and a little spongy. The picket-fence in front, with its gate squeaky and askew, and the side fences of the stake-and-rider type were in an equally run-down condition. As a matter of fact, they had aged synchronously with the persons who lived here, old Henry Reifsneider and his wife Phœbe Ann.

They had lived here, these two, ever since their marriage, forty-eight years before, and Henry had lived here before that from his childhood up. His father and mother, well along in years when he was a boy, had invited him to bring his wife here when he had first fallen in love and decided to marry; and he had done so. His father and mother were the companions of himself and his wife for ten years after they were married, when both died; and then Henry and Phœbe were left with their five children growing lustily apace. But all sorts of things had happened since then. Of the seven children, all told, that had been born to them, three had died; one girl had gone to Kansas; one boy had gone to Sioux Falls, never even to be heard of after; another boy had gone to Washington; and the last girl lived five counties away in the same State, but was so burdened with cares of her own that she rarely gave them a thought. Time and a commonplace home life that had never been attractive had
weaned
them thoroughly, so that, wherever they were, they gave little thought as to how it might be with their father and mother.

Old Henry Reifsneider and his wife Phœbe were a loving couple. You perhaps know how it is with simple natures that fasten themselves like lichens on the stones of circumstance and weather their days to a crumbling conclusion. The great world sounds widely, but it has no call for them. They have no soaring intellect. The orchard, the meadow, the corn-field, the pig-pen, and the chicken-lot measure the range of their human activities. When the wheat is headed it is reaped and threshed; when the corn is browned and frosted it is cut and shocked; when the timothy is in full head it is cut, and the hay-cock erected. After that comes winter, with the hauling of grain to market, the sawing and splitting of wood, the simple chores of fire-building, meal-getting, occasional repairing, and visiting. Beyond these and the changes of weather—the snows, the rains, and the fair days—there are no immediate, significant things. All the rest of life is a far-off, clamorous phantasmagoria, flickering like Northern lights in the night, and sounding as faintly as cow-bells tinkling in the distance.

Old Henry and his wife Phœbe were as fond of each other as it is possible for two old people to be who have nothing else in this life to be fond of. He was a thin old man, seventy when she died, a queer, crotchety person with coarse gray-black hair and beard, quite straggly and unkempt. He looked at you out of dull, fishy, watery eyes that had deep-brown crow's-feet at the sides. His clothes, like the clothes of many farmers, were aged and angular and baggy, standing out at the pockets, not fitting about the neck, protuberant and worn at elbow and knee. Phœbe Ann was thin and shapeless, a very umbrella of a woman, clad in shabby black, and with a black bonnet for her best wear. As time had passed, and they had only themselves to look after, their movements had become slower and slower, their activities fewer and fewer. The annual keep of pigs had been reduced from five to one grunting porker, and the single horse which Henry now retained was a sleepy animal, not over-nourished and not very clean. The chickens, of which formerly there was a large flock, had almost disappeared, owing to ferrets, foxes, and the lack of proper care, which produces disease. The former healthy garden was now a straggling memory of itself, and the vines and flower-beds that formerly ornamented the windows and dooryard had now become choking thickets. A will had been made which divided the small tax-eaten
property
equally among the remaining four, so that it was really of no interest to any of them. Yet these two lived together in peace and sympathy, only that now and then old Henry would become unduly cranky, complaining almost invariably that something had been neglected or mislaid which was of no importance at all.