Abel Melveny
Edgar Lee Masters 1868 (Garnett) – 1950 (Elkins Park)
I bought every kind of machine that's known --
Grinders, shellers, planters, mowers,
Mills and rakes and ploughs and threshers --
And all of them stood in the rain and sun,
Getting rusted, warped and battered,
For I had no sheds to store them in,
And no use for most of them.
And toward the last, when I thought it over,
There by my window, growing clearer
About myself, as my pulse slowed down,
And looked at one of the mills I bought --
Which I didn't have the slightest need of,
As things turned out, and I never ran --
A fine machine, once brightly varnished,
And eager to do its work,
Now with its paint washed off --
I saw myself as a good machine
That Life had never used.
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 40 sec read
- 141 Views
Quick analysis:
Scheme | ABBCDEFGGHIJKLMNOP |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 670 |
Words | 134 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 18 |
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"Abel Melveny" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 20 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/8493/abel-melveny>.
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