None knew in twenty years the secret life of Annie My bookish rooms, bringing her rhubarb pie Of Shakespeare, Sappho, and the thrilling voice I look down at the grave of Annie Garver: “Please say it’s old Aunt Hannah Armstrongįrom Illinois, come to see him about her sick boyĪnd wrote in his own hand Doug’s discharge,įROM here where the green slope gently rises “Oh, well, he ain’t the same as when I boarded himĪnd all of us called him Abe, there in Menard.”Īs a last attempt I turned to a guard and said: I was more than an hour finding the White House. Who wrote beautifully, write him a letter Then I went to town and had James Garber, I WROTE him a letter asking him for old times’ sake I cried when I beheld you there by the bed,Īs the sun stood low in the west growing smaller and fainter When you found me in old Virginia after the war, Seeing that with a cry of rapture, like that I uttered Praying for you to come, was your coming delayed? Why, when I lay so helpless in bed for years, O beautiful young republic for whom my John and I Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Webster, Clay. Through which great figures passed like hurrying horsemen,

To North Carolina and all my girlhood days,Īnd John, my John, away to the war with the British,Īnd all the children, the deaths, and all the sorrows.Īnd that stretch of years like a prairie in Illinois My thought ran back, it seemed, through infinite time Of a daughter-in-law stricken with age and gray.Īnd by night, or looking out of the window by day Hearing the tick of the clock, and the low of cattleĪnd the scream of a jay flying through falling leaves!ĭay after day alone in a room of the house My hundredth year was reached! And still I lay With the feeling that I had become eternal at last The years till a terror came in my heart at times, SPRING and Summer, Fall and Winter and SpringĪfter each other drifting, past my window drifting!Īnd I lay so many years watching them drift and counting Luring me with the promise of leisure for my novel,Īnd I married him, giving birth to eight children,Īnd died from lock-jaw, an ironical death. Then John Slack, the rich druggist, wooed me, Should it be celibacy, matrimony or unchastity? I WOULD have been as great as George Eliotįor look at the photograph of me made by Penniwit,

There is no marriage in heaven, But there is love. Wrought out my destiny-that through the flesh Tell him that my love for you, no less than my love for him Who broods upon what he calls our guilty love:. The stars sparkle, the whippoorwill calls,īut thou grievest, while my soul lies rapturous The balmy air of spring whispers through the sweet grass, MAURICE, weep not, I am not here under this pine tree.

Spoon river anthology george gray