Classic Poem

Opposite the house where my father died
Is the house where I was married
And my eldest was born …
Between them Seventy-Ninth Street runs from the Park to the river …

It is Sunday afternoon, summer, a shower has passed …
The broad street bears two floods from the West,
Folks and sundown …

My young wife and I sit in the cool dark parlour at the open windows …
Upstairs, our baby is sick with scarlet fever …

The yellow light has broken from the late blue sky,
And the washed street sparkles with glass and brick and stone,
The summer air has come over from wet park-gardens and loam;
The street laughs to our eyes and nostrils …

Past us, the people go home, families, lovers,
Bare-headed film wound girls, the tired children …
Folks in sundown, the holiday done, trudging by to their suppers …
The street laughs to our souls with the people …

And an old sense of the folk is mine …
I have lived this street, first one side, then the other …
Here I was the little child riding a velocipede down the pavement,
And here, after absence, a youth, rewriting Shakespeare in a top-floor room,
And here, a lover, signalling to a young girl in the house across the way,
And here, after absence again, married, moved over the street,
And here I became a father and learned to sing a sick child to sleep,
And here I lived with the simple people of my wife and tried to savour the humbler life of the city,
The workman's Third Avenue life, the crowded Saturday nights,
And here now I am writing stories of the folk,
Of mother and father, daughter and son, sister and brother,
Trying so to make of myself the good man,
The good father, the good husband, the good friend, the good citizen …

They go by me, the people who are shut in the world of the people,
The poor go by, seeming far from the troubled gorgeousness of the great who bind the ages together,
And far from my deep sad trouble, which is like a shining tear in the heart of which I sit …

Is it my sick child upstairs? or is it the sense of the girl who is my wife?
Or is it the past, the ghost of my father across the street?
Memories of birth and disease and death up and down the long-known houses?
Or is it the pity of time which always forgets the people
And remembers the great only?

Or is it that through it all runs pain, and pain forever,
And decay and sickness and dying?
So beautiful and so transient and so mysterious,
Bounded by silence and by ghosts …

An old sense of the folk is mine.
I must take my wife in my arms
And go down to the family at supper …