Famous Single Poems
mentary education, he had secured a job as a teacher in a little red schoolhouse in the village of Tongore, New York. He received ten dollars a month and was boarded around among the families of his pupils. Eight years later, he was still teaching, having in the meantime acquired a wife, but nothing else worth mentioning.
By this time he had come to the very reasonable conclusion that he would never get anywhere as a teacher, and finally, as a possible solution of life’s difficulties, decided to become a doctor. He had no especial predilection for doctoring, but he thought he might be able to make a better living that way, so he began to read such books of medicine as the local practitioner happened to own. It is worth noting that he had not, as yet, developed any interest in that study of nature which was to occupy all his later years. He was just blindly groping around trying to find some way to earn enough money to support his wife decently. It was under these circumstances that “Waiting” was written. But let him tell the story.
“I wrote considerable poetry as a young man,” he says, “but the verse form of expression hampered my thought. Rhyme and rhythm never flowed through my mind easily. My poems seemed to me manufactured rather than spontaneous, and a time came when I wrote no
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