Explore "Roof-Tree" by Edwina Stanton Babcock on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Far from the highway stands the empty home, / With unhinged door and warped and shrunken stair; / Over its walls the chilly shadows roam, / Rank to its lintels huddled ivies come; / Past its blind face the startled swallows fare.
Wrapped in its memories, it stands aloof, / Strange to itself, patient in wind and rain; / No tender hearth-breath curls around its roof, / No voice within welcomes or calls reproof; / No child's face peers behind the cobwebbed pane.
Let us not wonder why -- we shame it more / With echoing voice and stir. Let us depart, / Turning in pity from the hapless door, / Closing the dumb gate in awed silence, for / This is the dead hope of a human heart.