My Inheritance...

Joyce Kilmer

This is the first poem I remember memorizing:

The House With Nobody In It
By  Joyce Kilmer

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.

Mommy and I had read this poem a lot of times and I had memorized it. All the time I thought Joyce Kilmer was a gal. I was in Junior High or High School when I shared this poem for a class assignment. It was in the process of doing my research, I discover Joyce was the middle name of Alfred Joyce Kilmer!

Can you hear me reading this poem aloud? That may well be an ongoing theme as I share poems here. I can not share them with you without saying at least a few lines aloud—even though I am the only one who can hear me say the words.

The emotion of the words resonates with me.

I was in grade school when I first memorized this poem and felt the sadness and EXPRESSED the sadness of seeing "a house that has done what a house should do...a house that has sheltered life" left abandoned and falling apart.

As I wrote that last paragraph, I found myself automatically saying the words out loud once more.

Why do these poems mean so much to me? They are IN me. These words became a part of me all those years ago.

Who knows, perhaps some of the words of the poems in these two books I am sharing with you helped mold me into the woman I am today.

Who knows...

~ ~ ~ JESUS is LORD! ~ ~ ~